People (and myself) can rag on this website a lot but it really has changed the trajectory of my professional life. It’s where I:
* first learned about CRDTs, kickstarting an interest in distributed systems
* first learned about TLA+, kickstarting an interest in formal specification
* first saw the book Quantum Computing Since Democritus recommended (in a post about Professor Sussman’s reading list), kickstarting an interest in quantum computing
* first learned about the LEAN theorem prover, kickstarting an interest in machine-checked proofs of correctness for mathematical theorems
* first learned about tree-sitter, leading me to write a tree-sitter grammar for TLA+
All of these (well, except quantum computing really - that remains a pleasant side-hobby although I did work in Microsoft’s quantum program for a bit) are now things I use in the contracts I work on as an independent software engineering consultant, and the open source work I do in between. TLA+ especially has had an enormous impact. Five good posts over the course of ten years is still a pretty good signal/noise ratio!
Hey thanks for this comment! It reminded me that I wanted to play with TLA+ some years ago. Now, for the first time, I got a couple of models checked :)
Took me a while to find out where the cool kids had gone from Slashdot back then ;)
Speaking of which, let's keep HN a liberal and welcoming place also for corps/startups (but not astroturfers) where key developers, experts from non-IT, CEOs/CTOs can have a voice as that's what makes HN unique IMO.
Ah, I miss the old Slashdot. It took me a while to become a regular here as well. Slashdot got a bit too serious/corporate at some point and the founders eventually got out and at some point I just moved on as well. The last time I left a comment there was twelve years ago or so. I actually just logged in just to see if my account is still there. Karma still excellent :-).
I like HN, but it could do with people being maybe a bit less uptight and a bit lighter sometimes. The comment section seems to have quite a few pedantic know it-alls taking themselves way to seriously; just like slashdot used to. Welcoming is maybe not a term I'd necessarily use for this.
There's definitely a contingent in the HN comments with a bit of an antisocial streak. I wish people approached comments they take issue with with more of a pedagogical approach, starting with interpretive charity and trying to help the commenter see things in another way.
I'd actually use the term "welcoming" in this context.
People get paid to promote shit on HN. It's a job you can get. There's no hope for the old internet these days. You can welcome the spammers, if you want, but all you're gonna get is spam.
I like HN, but it could do with people being maybe a bit less uptight and a bit lighter sometimes. The comment section seems to have quite a few pedantic know it-alls taking themselves way to seriously; just like slashdot used to.
That's a fair point, but at least the one thing we don't have here (for the most part) in comparison to /. is the steady stream of comments of the
- GNAA
- In Soviet Korea Only Old People Spy You With Email
- Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those
- X is dying, Netcraft confirms it.
- etc.
sort. Not that some of that stuff wasn't funny for a moment, but it definitely grew stale after a while.
"Hot grits", obscene ASCII art, homophobia, racism, nazi jokes... The comments section on Slashdot was downright offensive. I never understood why Slashdot tolerated these things. They killed their own community.
HN was immediately the opposite: a place you could read the comments before the article.
Slashdot at the time was turning into a bit of a swamp, partly from its bad threaded commenting system, but mostly because of a constant addition of low-value "first" comments, needless attacks, and dumb links (Goatse, Rickrolling, etc.)
HN came around at the right time, and really had a better community with a good signal:noise ratio. The moderating system (flagging, up/down votes, and of course @dang and his predecessors) really helped.
One thing that's really impressed me as time has gone on is how far the expertise has expanded. I have bookmarked a bunch of users who consistently add solid insights, often with deep domain expertise sometimes from very unexpected quarters (diesel technicians, biologists, farmers, artists, musicians ...). They include @Animats @jdietrich @bkohlmann @nonbel @tptacek @zackmorris @jurassic @tamilama @patio11 @ries @nimbius @breakingcups @noduerme @300bps and many more.
> let's keep HN a liberal and welcoming place also for corps/startups (but not astroturfers) where key developers, experts from non-IT, CEOs/CTOs can have a voice
I agree and I would also like to see more encouragement for solopreneurs. As financial independence through solopreneurship has a better probability of being achieved than creating an unicorn startup; especially when not having a safety-net.
So maybe less of 'Why are you making money' when an indie showcases their product, While defending bad practices of Trillion dollar mEga corps. as 'They have to make money'!
P.S. Happy birthday HN, Congratulations & thanks to P.G, Initial set of users, Current users and of course Dan.
news.yc, like all other mimetic communities on the web, has its flaws. For ex, it reserves plenty wrath and fury for a certain type of corps and upstarts. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing; but, It is a thing.
I’ve been coming here from the beginning. Off and on. Different handles because I rarely saved my passwords. I absolutely appreciate all the gem comments especially from insiders. This is the only place that reminds me of 90s newsgroups.
I want to especially thank Dang for keeping this place consistent.
I've only been on HN since around ~2009 or something like that (11 years), but most people I've met in real-life who are also on HN have been recommended to visit the site first time from fellow hackers, rather than via other websites.
I was a reader of Paul Graham's essays and website, which I believe is where I heard about it. Or it might have been reddit (which I'm sure I heard about via PG). I joined Reddit on January 25, 2006 and HN on February 21, 2007.
We need Dang as a Guido style BDFL[1]. At least until the community has grown to fully take on and continue the culture. (Which I am assuming why Guido felt he could step down)
Hope they are taking great care of you at YC!
1. For those unaware, Guido, the creator of Python, who remained the Benevolent Dictator for life until 2018.
It feels like HN still upholds the early promise of the internet (along with Wikipedia and very small number of other websites). But what will the next 15 year bring about?
I also recommend people revisit archives of some high-quality web forums and websites like Geocities. There is a lot of revisionism going on in tech sector right now. Conveniently, it's nearly impossible to challenge in a space where a handful of people can disappear your posts by downvoting and a conversation stays "relevant" only for a few hours.
There was also a lot less diversity (in some ways) however with Web 1. You were fairly likely to be talking to someone quite nerdy or at least with similar hobbies. The barrier to entry is also of course much lower now generally. I agree the upvote / downvote system can SOMETIMES disappear a valid opinion but I cannot currently think of a better way to self moderate discussions like we have here.
The same thing does happen to an extent during in person conversations but the barrier for both making a challenging statement and "downvoting" a challenging statement or action is higher.
HN may not be able to actually BE what Web 1.0 was but it seems to make an honest attempt at it in the modern world.
In a billion years, when an alien species reaches earth and sees the ruins of human civilization, somehow one of the last remaining transmissions is that voice, calmly reminding everyone that anything is possible… at Zombocom
What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?
The Venture Capitalists and startuppers that made HN like the internet to be Free enough that new businesses and services can thrive, and Open Source for the accessible and reusable building blocks for their projects, but clearly like commercialization and being the middleman, like in the good old offline days. The headache of moderating their platforms feels more urgent than thinking about Freedom of Speech.
The early internet, to me, was the promise to remove those middlemen and have us directly connect, and, while using mostly free and low-overhead websites or services, contribute back. I expected real estate classifieds posted in an open format to open databases by now, and the job description of "real estate agent" retired.
When I think if "upholding" anything I might think of Slashdot clearly preaching Open Source and the Evils of Microsoft. Naive by today's standards but hey, it kept the old ethos alive for a little longer.
Edit: No doubt many other excellent values were upheld by HN and the moderators, so thanks for that!
What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?
That should probably be a whole separate post of its own! In fact, I'd encourage you, if you're interested, to consider writing up something on the topic and submit it as a new post. I think there's a lot to dig into with regards to what we all thought the "early promise of the Internet" was, and analyze it in terms of where we were wrong, where we've fallen short of the ideas, and - maybe most importantly - where there's room to take specific action(s) to get "back on the rails" so to speak.
It's not possible to go back though, so I wouldn't want to dwell on the past too much. There is probably a really good reason why everything is run by companies, why we have Discord instead of connecting with a variety of clients to an open protocoll. Probably because it's too difficult to make everything run smooth everywhere, so you need a team, so you need monetization. People like the reach and impact they can have on Twitter and Youtube, it's just so much louder than a little, undiscovered self-hosted blog could ever be, so what's the point?
Maybe tech will eventually be commodizided enough to give key infrastructure applications back to the "people". Or maybe the cloud providers will control it all? We'll see.
I agree - this could make an excellent discussion on its own. I bet we would see a large variety of opinions - the internet enabled all kinds of new methods of communication which in turn inspired different dreams in different people.
It's remarkable how unchanged the community feel has been on HN -- those headlines would not be out of place on today's front page if you change the company names and tech stacks a bit :) Doesn't seem like there's been an eternal September moment in the past decade and a half (like Reddit's push for mobile adoption, for example). Really a testament to the mods' consistency, thanks @dang!
The consistent design is what's holding HN back. The worst is when the top comment has so many replies, the first page is only reactions on that comment. Someone actually needs to sticky a comment saying there's a next page button with links to it. Oh and the links are unclickable on mobile.
Sure there are some tweeks that could be made. I'll take what we have currently though over having a designer decide what we really need is something like new Reddit.
Happy birthday HN. I absolutely love this community. Once I started reading HN somewhat frequently, there is no question that I became a better developer, thinker, researcher, and writer. The topics shared here seem to have no rival anywhere else on the internet ... at least, not as far as I am aware of.
I think this is a good time to admit that when I first came here, I was a bit shy to post anything about tech or programming, but by hanging out here and practicing what I learned here, I eventually felt worthy of contributing.
Wasn’t there a thread recently (can’t find it) about the limit of paging back to the earliest posts and that it actually started in October or similar? And feb is just the earliest the UI will let you click to, so anniversary is actually past already? Not to be a party pooper =|
I've been meaning to do something about those troll comments because they were posted several years after the original threads and people are still getting confused by them. (Needless to say, Arrington wasn't Arrington.) There were 500+ comments all posted within an hour, obviously by script. They were dead not because they were voted down, but because we killed them years later. I thought that would be sufficient but it wasn't.
I have a hunch that was what prompted pg ("I never write a line of code unless I have to") to close old threads to new comments.
I have no data or examples to back this up but very recently I have been noticing what seems to be a lot more comments with what seems to be intentionally divisive language and/or generic comments that do not seem to have much to do with the OP. Nothing this obvious but it was setting off some of the same flags in my head as some Reddit threads. Could just be that I am paranoid though :-D
If you are entering this into the browser console, you can use $$() as shorthand for document.querySelectorAll(), with chromium-based browsers at least. As a bonus, it returns an array so you can map/filter.
Fifteen years gone by
watching tech fads come and go.
Was that time well spent?
This website had a huge influence over my worldview and I often find myself searching through the archived comments for all sorts of topics. Here's to 15 more years!
Today I learned that I joined HN before jgrahamc. I think I will substitute my Slashdot 5-digit UID for my HN join date as my favorite nerd-humblebrag.
Hah... I remember feeling shameful about my 5 digit /. UID because everybody knew the real OG's had 4 digit ones!
God that brings back memories. I checked my /. profile just now and see that I still have an AIM id and an ICQ id listed there. Yikes. And the email address points to a domain I haven't owned in like 15 years. At least the jabber address I had listed is actually still active.
I remember refreshing slashdot to see the announcement introducing accounts. Teenage me decided to be one of the "the concept of accounts on this site is dumb" folks. (For months after slashdot introduced accounts there were all sorts of AnonymousCowards talking about how dumb the idea was). Eventually I relented and got my 5 digit uid. Years later I would cringe thinking about it, knowing I had an opportunity for a 3 or 4 digit one (when it was still cool and relevant to have such a thing). These days the fact that my reddit account is almost old enough to drive, and my HN account is 14.25 just makes me feel old :D.
The place I really miss is kuro5hin. That site was a gem.
Kuro5hin was amazing until the trolls took over. I really liked the idea of people writing stories and have them subject to editorial comments before they go live. That's sort of what my mental model of what citizen journalism should look like, and what modern scientific journals should be like. I haven't seen anyone do anything quite like it since, which is a shame.
Another site, less known than kuro5hin that was great for awhile was called Jyte. You just post whatever random statement you want, and people can vote "agree" or "disagree". The community was amazing. It was kind of like a game where you try to find some issue where reasonable people are roughly equally split. It was also something where you could just interject any topic you like for any reason. Maybe that's what people get out of twitter -- I don't use it myself.
Same here, even though in the early years I was still trying to hang out more on programmning.reddit.com. But I don't think that extended into 2008 and I'm too lazy to check now.
Also, checking now I can't believe I joined so soon after this website was announced. Now I wish I had invested in BTC when it was considered as expensive at $100.
HN has been an amazing resource for my own personal development, and remains a reliable source for high quality content and discussion in certain topics. I think that has a lot to do with its smart design decisions and approach to moderation, and for that I'm very thankful.
One curiosity for a social site is that despite being pretty active here, and having some good exchanges, I've never actually connected with someone here. It's a forum rooted in ideas, not people, and that's reinforced by its product restraints: no avatars, no following, no DMs, no blackbox algorithms. I really appreciate that, vis-a-vis other parts of the internet, though I do occasionally wish I could connect with the people behind the ideas.
One funny quirk of being such an eng-oriented forum is a long time ago they let you sign up without an email, which meant when I lost my password I had to start a new account. I'd love to restore my original username.
I know people are always talking about the downfall of the web, but doesn't hackernews show that the spirit is alive and well? And further, great sites don't have to devolve into shit. I don't use social media, so to me the web _is_ places like hackernews and the great resources it typically references. Cheers and thank you all.
Happy birthday Hacker News! It's usually the first site I pull up everyday, and even though I mostly just lurk I've learnt a lot of interesting info from the site. I appreciate the linked articles and insightful discussions on here.
HN is what reddit used to be like when it first started. Links to interesting Tech, programming and science stories and high quality discussion compared to something like Digg.
Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. Its still so good I dont even click on the link I click on comments to get a HN summary which gives me a pretty good idea if its worth reading or not. Most of the time the comments are even better and more informative.
Not having "sub-combinators" might have contributed to that, and the relentless moderation by dang, who has mildly reprimanded me too. I think it works very well indeed!
I always thought it was the opposite. That subreddits allowed the community to expand without catering to the lowest common denominator, and reddit would have fallen off the cliff faster without those.
In my view Reddit and Twitter occupy the same rung with respect to discourse. There’s a lot of variation between the subreddits and between the various pockets of Twitter, but on average the lowest common denominator is not an inaccurate characterization of those communities.
I think that Reddit is a degree better than Twitter: it's still possible to find long, substantive discussions on Reddit, but the artificial length constraint on Twitter really pushes all users toward pithy "burns" and other toxic forms of discourse.
As a counterpoint, Twitter "threads" are a thing and you can find a lot of good discourse on them. I don't know how I feel about the length constraint--part of me thinks that the people who for whom the constraint is a toxicity trap are going to be the same people who don't avail themselves of Reddit's lack of length constraint and thus come across as baity and otherwise toxic no matter the platform.
Similarly, I think that Reddit optimizes for groupthink even more than Twitter does. Good luck having an insightful conversation in /r/pol or /r/conservative or even some technology subreddit.
And mind, I think Twitter Inc is absolutely awful and Twitter is a societal ill. I just don't perceive a significant degree of difference between it and Reddit with respect to discourse.
I tend to agree with this. Subreddits are fantastic for hobbies and specialised interests. Unfortunately, reddit is increasingly becoming a hub for astroturfing at the same time as search results become more unreliable.
I've always thought HN was more like the spiritual successor to Slashdot then (most of) Reddit.
On /. it was COMMON to be participating in a discussion about (for example) a camera problem on one of NASAs' probes, and very soon you would discover that the actual people from NASA that were working on it were in the forum talking about what they were actually doing and getting to the core issues rather then the press-release fluff.
If there was a science/tech story you could almost guarantee that the authors of the paper themselves would show up, and all of a sudden you would get 10PHD's from different fields all "working together".
There was another thread that I remember a bit better because I was involved in it. Somebody had an old/obscure bit of computer hardware that was last used in a 386. (A tape-drive backup that used the floppy-controller to read/write data to the drive.) The person was desperate to get a copy of his thesis off of the drive, but there was a hardware failure on both the drive and the old PC.
Well in the thread one of the old engineers that had designed the drive at his old company chimed and said he had the part that was broken and would ship it out to him. Then another person offered to send a USB to Floppy controller so that his "new PC" (sans floppy interface) would be able to work. THEN the tech director of a major backup company (software) offered his labs to have the the whole PC & tape drive shipped to their headquarters where the lab would get the files off the drive for free because "I want my team to have the chance to train on this, and learn how to restore it all."
In the end it was a happy story for the end-user. But I see a similar gathering of the minds on HN as I once did on Slashdot.
My /. ID was 5 digits....
The internet was different back then, but it's nice to see that people can still be the same.
Things aren't that bad, but I've definitely noticed a lot more cases of downvoting of "against the grain" comments or opinions with often very few responses in the last couple of years.
Previously, I rarely noticed heavily downvoted comments, and in the cases they were, there were almost always reply comments explaining the opposite side, leading to IMO much better discourse and discussion.
Maybe, but 5-10 years ago Apple-bashing was a karma death sentence (never guess how I learned that). Now it seems to be more of an active discussion (mostly due to the MBP keyboard situation I guess?).
When I see a lot of downvotes I usually ask myself "what do they know that I don't?" I would assume some portion of downvotes are due to a knowledge disparity. And if there's a lot of downvotes against my comment, then there's a chance I'm missing some key knowledge.
Big Tech bashing is in fashion, is that really a surprise? It's totally mainstream now. That doesn't mean HN is more accepting of alternative viewpoints in general. Maybe even the opposite.
Reputation Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management
which obviously protects income streams for entities, but the military also protect businesses online because they are protecting money coming in from abroad, this is what politics is all about, placating the public which business gets its way, stuff you probably dont need to know about and so wont be taught about it.
Such things of course exist but the problem is that internet users are inclined to see astroturfing, shilling, brigading, state actors, and so on in every comment they dislike. Then they react aggressively as if they are uncovering crimes, which pushes discussion quality downhill. That's why we ask people not to post that way unless they have actual evidence (in which case they should be sending it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate). Someone else having a disagreeable view does not count as evidence.
I have noticed the same, but when I have mentioned this in the past I have been downvoted and told that I am being "conspiratorial". This is definitely a problem on Hacker News, because it is a website beholden to a company (YCombinator). This company has a vested interest in ensuring that the messages on Hacker News reflect what the popular narrative is as it reflects upon them personally. In other words as long as large companies control the medium the messages will be controlled by said company. There is only the illusion of free speech on the Internet. You can say whatever you want, but don't be surprised if nobody can hear you.
I've only been browsing here for about 10 of the 15 years, but I remember a time when the discussions closely matched what I and the public at large could discuss in private without fear.
But there has been a chilling effect in recent years where more and more topics become verboten and someone will get downvoted, at a minimum, for even bringing them up. Interesting topics and child threads go missing on the regular. We're even at a point now where certain corporate press releases cannot even be questioned at all, despite the same corporations being stuck with heavy fines for similar past behavior they're being accused of now.
I still like HN for the purely technical aspects, but I don't know anyone who still views it as a place where complex ideas that affect society can be discussed anymore.
"Verboten" is a strong word; to my mind that refers to things that can't be discussed because they would challenge the power structure, like how you can't talk about Tank Guy in Chinese social media.
That's not HN. When you get downvoted for hot-button political stuff, that's like getting shushed for talking about football in church. It's not censored, but this isn't the place for it.
I've been thinking of building an HN clone for politics and society. The requirement to post would be an account of the same name on HN, validated through something like a code on your profile, and only for users above a certain karma threshold.
It basically outsourced the work of making sure users are of decent tech savviness and good faith.
I have to agree with berkut. I had to stop using a previous hn account because it was so incredibly frustrating when people would downvote me with no explanation. I would cite my comments with reputable sources but that never helped.
It was enough to prevent me from contributing to the discussion until recently.
Certain beliefs or opinions in the minority are not very well tolderated here. It's still certainly better than other sites, but from my perspective it is slowly sliding downwards.
If I do post, it likely would not be anything remotely controversial.
I don't blame HN, I blame the invention of the downvote button.
I find it easier to hold a slightly controversial opinion here than it has ever been possible on Reddit, especially the programming and tech subreddits which are very low quality in general.
The downvote button is awful, but why is it surprising that controversial opinions are downvoted? Being downvoted is the proof the opinion is controversial. It would be better if people weren't cancelled because they go against the grain, sure, but we don't live in a perfect utopia of perfectly rational beings.
Talking of Reddit downvoted, I am not sure it is that bad. I have been downvoted to hell and I have downvoted. But my observation is that downvoted comments get hidden quickly so only the truly extreme comments are downvoted big or only the true believers go and find comments to downvote. Net net it happens but it is easier to get a 100 votes than to lose them and I think it may be easier to get 1000 votes than to lose 1000.
Fair enough, the problem with Reddit downvotes is dwarfed by the fact that Reddit's "etiquette" is to promote witty and sharp one liners, compared to deep and thoughtful comments, and it is the opposite of HN, where you can have the witty but shallow takedowns but the amount of thoughtful comments is above any other discussion forum this size.
It's not just Reddit's "etiquette", it's the general direction where most social media comment sections are pushing their users via design and algorithms.
Ah, but if you think about it, the upvote button has the same dysfunction as the downvote button, just at the other extreme. The downvote button punishes controversy; but the upvote button rewards orthodoxy. So even without a downvote option, orthodox comments rise to the top.
The upvote button also acts a bit like a Rotten Tomatoes score, in that it compresses the full range of "scores" people might give something down into just "did you like it or not." So something that a thousand people can like just enough to vote for, will end up upvoted much more highly than something that 100 people absolutely love. The things you see rising to the top are thus whatever is "blandly agreeable" to the most people, rather than what is "seriously amazing" to a non-negligible subset of people.
---
IMHO a "proper" solution for both of these problems would be entirely different than what we've got now.
• The primary factor for ranking posts/comments would be an "engagement score", coming from how long in aggregate users spend actually looking at/reading the comment or linked page (which is in fact practical to observe if this social-bookmarking service is interacted with primarily through a browser extension / app, as would be the modern trend.)
• Posts (and comment threads) would additionally gain some (diminished) bonuses from the aggregate scores of their child-comment subtrees. So boring posts/root-comments with engaging comments subthreads would still rise to the top, to ensure that those subthreads are surfaced to appreciate. (Probably there'd have to be UX for this case, highlighting the aspect of the post+comments that's so engaging.)
• Something upvote-like would still exist (though it'd be optional for the system's functioning, because of the engagement score); but adding one would require a proof-of-work (e.g. solving a CAPTCHA.) This signal could thus be factored quite strongly when available (presuming the service has sufficient anti-botting measures in place.)
• You can actually upvote things multiple times — but the proof-of-work required would be exponentially-increasing. One CAPTCHA for one point; another two for a second point; another four for a third point. This solves the "Rotten Tomatoes" problem.
• No downvotes; instead, comments can mark themselves as being a "rebuttal" to the post/comment they're responding to. (Maybe entirely-separate "comment" and "rebut" UX flows.) The aggregate engagement+upvote scores of all "rebuttals" to a thing, would then be inherited as a "malus", i.e. a bonus with the sign flipped; high-scoring rebuttals lower the rank of the thing they rebut, which means that that thing then has less of a score to contribute as a bonus to its own ancestors.
• This down-ranking would be applied recursively from the leaf nodes up; the malus of a rebuttal on its ancestors would be "weakened" if the rebuttal was hit with a malus from high-powered rebuttals of its own.
That's an excellent analysis, thank you. One thing I wanted to expand upon:
> posts/root-comments with engaging comments subthreads would still rise to the top, to ensure that those subthreads are surfaced to appreciate. (Probably there'd have to be UX for this case, highlighting the aspect of the post+comments that's so engaging.)
I think HN does something like that, and I appreciate they don't have any particular UX to indicate any "surfacing", but it's just organically applied to the ranking.
Example:
* Just posted top-level comments get the first spot for some time, so people have a chance to interact with them. Often you open a big thread with hundreds of comments and the first comment is 1 minute old. That's great.
* I'm pretty sure HN (and possibly Reddit, but I have no evidence for either) rank a top-level comment higher if a reply has a lot of votes/engagement.
* I'm somewhat positive HN downranks top-level comments that have a very high number of downvoted/controversial/high comment-to-vote ratio replies. I'm certain HN does that for posts (comments > vote = probably controversial post, slightly downranked).
* All of these things don't require UX, so they're a little opaque so people won't try to gamify their comments to manually nudge them toward some position in the thread.
I guess I'll chime in and say that I, too, have noticed more downvotes when I wouldn't normally predict them.
Unlike the other commenters, I'm not worried about it. It's just a sign of growth and HN going mainstream. The mods keep everyone on a tight leash, so I think the content will remain good.
It is a bit frustrating to post something that feels high quality but people disagree. But that's the price you pay for not being perfect to everyone all the time. (You see? It's impossible.) So don't let it bug you.
> Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit.
I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy.
Many times a week i type "reddit <some topic I'm curious about>" and the top threads/comments are almost always someone with better knowledge on that subject than anything else I can find on the internet.
It's just funny how everyone's perception is different, but I think Reddit is a modern marvel.
I like Reddit but I think you have to be very careful about trusting any information on it, it's a populist's wet dream.
There have been multiple times on Reddit I saw a comment about something I personally had deep knowledge of, and was astounded at how inaccurate the comment was relative to the thousands of upvotes and dozens of awards it had.
This has made me wary of comments relating to subjects I have zero expertise in, as I can't properly evaluate if they're correct and I can't trust the responses or upvotes because those might come from people with as little expertise in the subject as me.
Since upvotes don't correlate with truthfulness, they only correlate with popularity, they're useless as a measurement of how accurate a comment is. This is usually exacerbated by how popular a given subreddit is, with smaller niche subreddits being better (in my experience).
That said I do indeed go to Reddit first for most of my purchasing or entertainment decisions, just have to be careful to take any info there with a massive heaping of salt.
This may just be my confirmation bias, but I started using Reddit in 2012 and that felt like the big heyday and the peak of the site. It had reached critical mass to be interesting, but the new UI design hadn't come yet and it still felt niche enough to have the weird, interesting corners.
The quality on HN has dropped massively in the last 5 years. It’s still better than Reddit but it’s definitely not where it once was.
I also think the peer moderation on here is broken. Again, it’s better than Reddit but I still think HN can improve things. I have a few ideas on how that could work but I don’t think there’s any incentive to change the status quo (and I sympathise with why too).
This remains my favorite forum on the Internet without customizing things. Curated set of twitter or fb or other friends are pretty good too, but the new user experience without customization here is amazing.
HN is the only place where I feel truly comfortable and at home. Through divorce, addiction, and desperation of all kinds. Thank you and to another 15 years.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here but I am finding HN to be more and more like Reddit everyday. I normally only read HN articles that have atleast 500 points or more and have notifications setup for it. In the past I used to get only 1 or 2 notifications a week. Now I get atleast 4 a day. I find it hard nowadays to keep up.
> On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry (hotornot.com)
> 67 points by matt on Feb 19, 2007 | hide | 3 comments
Was curious about this post. Found it here [1]. Reading this was interesting and felt a bit like going back in a time-machine. Hot or Not was a fantastic site -because it inspired a lot of my friends and myself in the early 2000s to build similar things. One thing I didn't realise is how much money the site was making then. Wikipedia claims it was doing $7m in revs in 2008
Big thanks to pg, dang, all the others involved and all the HN community.
Happy birthday!
P.S: I think it's one of those threads that can have the old /. or reddit feeling, posting messages without much substance but that do still feel good and even with an oldschool smiley ; )
I have no doubt that the first page of HN made me the professional I am now and the comments helped me to forge strong opinions. It has been a while since I started using the HN search engine to know better about technical topics.
Sure I am grateful to dang and all the members. of the community. I guess
I have a bit of conflict on the origin of the community, not saying there is anything wrong in what it is but maybe no connections with a private initiative would make me feel more comfortable, but I guess that it is what it is and I should say thank you to Y Combinator too.
Congrats, a great place to discuss interesting topics.
Wonder how HN moderators deal with spam? I have a phpBB3 (was phpBB2) forum for 17 years, still running, and had to be inventive with spam: for the last 5 years you have to solve a dot product and answer a logic question during registration. It may exclude some genuine visitors unfortunately. Also migrated the server to different VPS companies, it takes energy to keep a forum running, a popular site such as HN in particular.
If instead of coming here for 15years and leaving a comment every other day you invested the dollar amount equivalent to the time you took to write that comment instead you would have $100k.
10 mins(time to read/write comment) x $120/hr
= $20 x 30 days/mo x 0.5 (every other day)
= $300/mo x 15 years x 8% (compounded annually)
= $100k
Amount of time spent on the site is too low I'd estimate, but then the income too high. The real problem is probably that, if you'd actually do this and try to value all your time like this... you'd burn out by the time you got to $1800 or something!
HN is worth celebrating, but it's crazy how taking the link back to early days turns up so many dead links... some but not all in wayback. The sense then was things go up on the internet to stay forever, and in not a lot of time that's proven wrong.
Sometimes I wonder how many years I'm going to keep maintaining ancient pages on my server with PHP upgrades and stuff. I feel bad for letting them go dead. And then I turn around and click another link from three months ago and wonder why I even bother...
And that's when I make another donation to the vital Internet Archive
I very much appreciate this site, the stuff I've learned and been able to share, and the excellent just-the-right-amount moderation. I just checked, and it looks like I joined on 2007-02-21, cool!
Happy birthday HN! 10 years ago, I accidentally found HN and left the local pirate community, which translated many posts (for Non-English speakers) from HN and never gave links to original content.
I've been coming here daily since 2018, before that I use to go to /g/. Difference is that over here I can get insights from highly intelligent people without being called a ret*d.
I think what I owe to this place is me transforming from a dumb fellow who would say "This ${shiny_thing} solves world hunger & ${everything_else} is wrong!" to "Yeah, naah ... everyone has a point of view and is right from their vantage point"
Bear in mind that English not my main language so I can't possibly transfer what I think clearly. This is also the reason of why I don't comment regularly (like never).
HN is still my go to source of news about almost anything. Ukraine crisis, health tech, startups, computer history, new technologies... anything. Right now, I literally have hundreds (yes) tabs open to just read the comments.
But HN also made me learn something. It was first 3-4 years ago and I still see the same signals every month or at least at 2-3 months. It is: "even if you have %98 correlation between things you and other people like there can be some fundamental differences between you and them and if you dig these things you will just drift apart"
We have a lot in common. A lot of us believes on tried and tested technologies instead of latest SmthJS. We still advocate Firefox instead of Chrome to serve libre software. We think that the power and money is highly concentrated on a handful of people and the distribution is not fair (but not the "5 families are managing the world" shit). We want free flowing data. We want the soul of web 1.0 back. Etc..
But what's detail and what's fundamental is different per person and I think the things we agree on is the details. We are different in fundamentals. We have very different world views and we fundamentally want different things from life.
Ok, 2 paragraphs ago I said that I noticed these things 3-4 years ago and here is the samples I remember:
* It was first started with GDPR. I possibly can't find the comment but I literally read a comment saying: "These are the reasons why Europe can't have successful startups. For a 3-4 people startup there is no way to delete PII from db. There is too much foreign keys in db to do that. Also we have sharding, replication etc. This increases the costs for smaller startups".
MVP and "over engineering" are not binary terms. There must be a middle ground. But we can't agree on that because the middle ground changes based on our opinions. And in my opinion Privacy is not something you can gloss over for mvp or because you are a startup. For example can you save clear-text passwords just because you are startup? What about SSL? Even letsencrypt requires some work. Do you thing this is a "burden on startups"? What about people in Germany who wants their home to be blurred on maps software? If you can't satisfy their demands then maybe you are not in their market to sell your software. Just please stop pretending you are immune to the problems because you are not "big enough". What's the difference between the news from 2010s that Facebook employee reading old girlfriends private messages and your developer can do a select * from users where gender="female"?
* Contemning people who prefer a more work-life balanced work and a hand of government on "free market" is another thing bothers me. By the way I'm from Turkey and I don't have a horse in EU-US game but "oh, you make 60k in 1 year? what a loser", "EU don't have startups because they go home at 5pm", "They don't have startups because they don't do hackathons" or "They don't have startups because they have unions" is a just a very myopic way of looking at life.
The United States is the only country among the 38 member OECD nations that has not passed laws requiring businesses and corporations to offer paid maternity leave to their employees. Netherlands will send a nurse for 1 whole week to the home of the mother and they will even do the groceries so the mother can get at least a little sleep. I will just rest my case here. Oh sorry, I also think that no one in Germany gets bankrupt just because they call an ambulance.
* Why can't we have businesses? Just normal businesses without obsession over growth, being a unicorn, getting bought by FAANG or IPO? Why don't we have more pinboard, screenjar, nomadlist, simpleanalytics or lunchmoney? I learned all of this sites from HN and I'm pretty sure they are operating like normal businesses.
I can understand that after you become successful, someone or some company can approach you to buy you. But starting with that idea from day 1? I can't understand that. Linode got acquired, redis also, lastpass too. Why do I have to constantly follow the blog/news pages of the companies I work with so that my information does not fall into the hands of companies I do not want? Why can't you silicon valley guys can't just have an idea, execute that idea with a couple of developers, employ some accountant, hr manager etc and call it a day? Raise the prices yearly a little bir more than inflation and live a life? Maybe answer some customer mails yourself so thay can also feel a connection. Maybe just meet some of your customers? I can't understand the obsession with growth. That's the reason why our planet is in this situation. You can double your growth infinitely and keep a healthy relationship with anything.
But, I love you guys. I can say that in the last 10 years possibly %40 of the things I learned was from HN. I wish you a happy weekend.
The good old days, most fantastic. Now it's to degenerated into some combination of echo chamber and safe place, with no lively debate, certainly not about anything controversial. Very sad.
I agree with him partly, and at least two other users voiced the same concern, one albeit in an abrasive manner. It's still the best place to have a debate though.
There are some topics that are very predictable, some of them are noticeably left issues, some things more loosely connected. Crypto, Tesla, Brave, Facebook, Israel, etc. are all subjects you'll most likely get heavily downvoted and probably flagged if you don't view the common (to here) opinion.
HN is not immune to group think and talking points get parroted here often, dissenting views flagged and downvoted. But not always, it's definitely nowhere near Reddit bad.
Like I said at the top, it's the best place on the internet to have a discussion, but not perfect, and seemingly getting a worse slowly, the way it always seems to go.
I've been around since near the start in one way or another. The only big change I've seen is the near complete disappearance of casual bigotry. People still voice a wide range of views, but now it helps to not be an ass about it. It used to be someone could just go on a screed about the right topics and get lots of upvotes. Now they have to launder it a bit.
The flipside is I can actually share my somewhat left of center views without being flagged and downvoted into oblivion as long as I practice a little decorum. If anything, the quality is up because people have to put a little effort in now.
I haven't seen bigotry at any scale really, but my definition isn't as loose as it is for some people.
Decorum is always welcome, but that's not really what I'm talking about, my main observation has been the group think, parroting of talking points, downvoting without disputing, and most importantly flagging to disagree with/hide dissent.
Some topics draw it more than others, I mentioned the obvious ones, it seeps into others though.
It doesn't matter how cordial you are, sometimes you will be flagged for your contrarian views.
Honestly user flagging and possibly even downvoting should be removed, it's abused too much.
A simple block button that would hide all posts from the user for that client would suffice, mods could look at block rates of a post/user and review if it is spam or breaks the rules.
I'm sorry but I don't need another person's opinion of a post to grey out or hide a comment. I can make the judgement for myself whether I disagree with it or not.
We must acknowledge that it went from the free speech place for nerds and autists with zero censure to a safe space for mediocre imposters where everything slightly unconventional is being flagged.
Yes, even in a thread like this there are people that don't know how to behave. FWIW I did not expect to flag a comment in this thread, but you managed to cross my threshold.
And if it is so aggravating to you, why do you keep coming back?
* first learned about CRDTs, kickstarting an interest in distributed systems
* first learned about TLA+, kickstarting an interest in formal specification
* first saw the book Quantum Computing Since Democritus recommended (in a post about Professor Sussman’s reading list), kickstarting an interest in quantum computing
* first learned about the LEAN theorem prover, kickstarting an interest in machine-checked proofs of correctness for mathematical theorems
* first learned about tree-sitter, leading me to write a tree-sitter grammar for TLA+
All of these (well, except quantum computing really - that remains a pleasant side-hobby although I did work in Microsoft’s quantum program for a bit) are now things I use in the contracts I work on as an independent software engineering consultant, and the open source work I do in between. TLA+ especially has had an enormous impact. Five good posts over the course of ten years is still a pretty good signal/noise ratio!