Thank You HN
Thank you HN and particularly YCombinator, admins and its founders. I found YCombinator at the age of 18-19 when I was going through my own way, I started my Bachelors university studies 4 years before I graduated from school, Computer Science has been my curiosity field ever since and YCombinator has had always fresh news, interesting content and startups (I found about it at the time through Daniel Gross who's at my age). I gave up on people on other forums such SOF, FB, LinkedIn and reddit, I've come across your forums for the first time just now and they are such sane, it's so pleasant to read your content. I'd not known about any place to be able to talk to any place with other people like me besides traveling to US to YCombinator startup combinator, and I like my job and now when I found this forum it feel such a warm place (I found it while looking for information about dbus) and it feels like I finally can talk to people who are just like me and write posts and post comments like THIS without being threatened. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!! Mr. Graham, founders, admins you rock!!!! <3 ^_^ :)
108 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadI mean sure there are aggressive responses but nothing like the vitriol you see on many other platforms.
By not striving, it achieves it.
The interface plays a major role. Most are turned away by how 1999 it looks. The flip side of that is that the "community" here is much like those of the 90's. You had to be somewhat intelligent to get online in the first place, and most everyone who could had a lot in common right out of the gate. No need to contrive "community", it forms organically, as it should.
The couple of times that I've been (factually) wrong about something on here I'd say it was 50/50 between being corrected politely and abrasively. Compare that to twitter, where it seems the entire point of the website is to dunk on people, and 50/50 is not so bad.
When slurs, personal attacks and incivility are fair game you can't attack inconvenient opinions by complaining that they are not presented in a high enough brow manner.
This tilts the balance of power in favor of whatever the local majority opinion is (as if voting wasn't a strong enough mechanism for doing that) because every subjective rule you can possibly use to exclude commentary will always get wielded harder against the minority opinion.
Warm is nice. HN can lean cold, which is not so bad either.
Compared to Reddit, where such behavior is par for the course.
A place with room for constructive (or not) criticism, one that is not oppressed by outrage culture and people vigilant to construe everything you say as a personal insult that must be condemned, a place where you can be sure to be told directly when and why you're wrong, that is indeed a warm place, one where you don't doubt that people mean what they say.
This is unimaginable in most major forums I know.
I'm taking OP's description of "warm" to mean "not hostile", which I think is true. I've seen people throw out baseless insults on front page threads and you can watch them be buried live in real time over the course of about 15 seconds.
It's one thing to have a set of civil house rules for a forum, but the community here is much better at enforcing them than any other I've seen in this space.
Besides that, HN is very nicely moderated. It might be just me, but I value non-echo-chamber places. HN is very surprisingly very diverse, and I have considered many POVs that I hadn’t considered before. HN made me a better person.
Apart from that, people in HN are generally very helpful and are keen on giving valuable advive. Thanks, everyone.
HN has been transformative in my life and journey. I am a much better engineer, well versed in diverse subjects. I am in a much better place in my career for HN. They say, "if you are the smartest person in a room, change the room, if you care to grow". I am certainly not the smartest or the most experienced person in this room, and I grew a lot and keep growing due to HN.
I lived (and now live, due to WFH) in a very small town. What I do, nobody understands. First, FB connected me with smart, accomplished expats who grew up in my town, then Quora gave me a glimpse of outside world, Amazon gave me book-gadget-parity, and Reddit gave me a good base. I learned programming with the help of Reddit recommended sources. Then finally, HN recommended sources made me, and keeps making me better.
And thanks to pirates, too, because many stuff that I could not literally afford, were available for free.
I got to know about SICP, nand2tetris, genetic programming, and a lot of other things from HN for the first time.
And the level of competence of people on HN is much higher. I get better just by trying to be worthy of this place.
A heartfelt thanks to HN.
I will make a post, too, when I am where I want to be.
I like to call them Good Samaritans because I also cannot literally afford to buy the interesting things I want. In the age of perpetual copyright and DRM, it would be a much less interesting world for me if I had to pay for everything. Some of the things I am most interested in cannot be found in the public library.
For example, "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche on Amazon is $3.99 for the eBook, $17.99 Hardcover and $6.99 for paperback. Nietzsche has been dead for 122 years, so why do I have to pay? No one currently alive had anything to do with helping Nietzsche produce his work.
Pirate Bay to the rescue, I downloaded the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche (72 books, essays and other works) for the total cost of FREE. How amazing is that? I'm not sure I could even do that by paying for it. Thank you to anyone who made that torrent available (or similar torrents.) You're doing God's work.
> Pirate Bay to the rescue, I downloaded the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche (72 books, essays and other works) for the total cost of FREE. How amazing is that? I'm not sure I could even do that by paying for it.
You have a good point, but chose a bad example. For works that are public domain or otherwise out of copyright (at least, non-obscure ones), you have fairly good legal download options, starting with Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/779
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Nietzsche&and[]=creator...
Within that set of public domain works, the most popular ones often have somewhat nicer (but still free) editions from places like Standard Ebooks, Feedbooks, and Manybooks:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=Nietzsche
https://www.feedbooks.com/search?protection=without_drm&quer...
https://manybooks.net/search-book?search=Nietzsche
Also, for books, it’s always worth trying Gutenberg, first: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/779
But generally speaking HN is very "warm" when you ask for help in desperate situations. And it is not just bound to Tech. You have Chemist, Physicist, Biologist, Lawyers, Doctors, Virologist, Finance ( Non - FinTech ), Food Sectors, People actually working inside government etc etc, ( 12+ years in I am surprised at the diversity of expert reading HN. ) nerds from all around the world hanging on HN, You have professionals giving you some advices or at least a place to start and improve the situation while you may be completely helpless or clueless.
I had to stop using Reddit/Twitter for the most part. You can't have a reasonable discourse on those platforms.
On Reddit I got called slurs, I've had people tell me I'm a horrible human for saying you can't afford LA on 40k a year. Here people are at least civil.
The first place I search for tech related commentary is on https://hn.aloglia.com/ to see what articles were shared and who commented what on a particular topic on news.yc. It has served me well.
Many "experts" have taken to twitter instead of commenting here (kind of self-censored themselves from entering the discussions here) which is a shame, as twitter is an endless pit that is nigh on impossible to filter for quality opinion.
The diff between HN & Twitter is voting mechanism at HN.
Voting mechanism when all is said and done, has kept things sane and of high quality (though there is a echo chamber kind of vibe going, to the detriment of diversity of thoughts).
At least for searching tech related comments, site:news.ycombinator.com is a mandatory filter for me on any search engine nowadays.
On HN, I never got the vibe of sects as anyone can be challenged and there is one singular front page instead of a custom algo home page that gives almost echo chamber by default with twitter.
Because of the quality/voting, I never regret reading HN. I often regret knowing twitter exists after reading. Even if there is good content there, it is not enjoyable to follow a multiple tweet single thought or sorting through replies. It is just plain frustrating to me.
However, I have definitely noticed that, over time, a certain set of views that were common before, have been marginalized or disappeared altogether. Particularly the libertarian/right-wing of the US political spectrum, which used to be very popular around here, is now substantially under-represented or even completely absent. I say that as someone who hated that perspective - I found certain comments maddening - but in a way it was interesting to hear views that are very far from my background.
Part of it is probably that even tangentially-political content is stomped on extremely quickly by dang. Part of it is that the growth in the number of commenters clearly changed the social and geographical composition of commenters (there are lots of internationals like me now, whereas it used to be mostly US west-coasters). Part of it is probably that certain positions "lost" the public debate. In the end, it's how it is.
Here, I hardly ever even read who I am replying to.
*1. Restricted comment downvoting*
A user must achieve a not-insignificant amount of karma before they can access the downvote-comment feature.
*2. Lack of emphasis on notifications, especially regarding comment replies*
This is huge! It must certainly decrease engagement in the short run to continue with the status quo, compared to Reddit notifying the user of every reply via every protocol available to them. You have to seek out a reply to your comment, which requires you to write something worth responding to. It reduces Poe’s law significantly. I would actively oppose notifications being integrated into news.ycombinator.com - the apps and readers can do as they please. Wonderful balance, thank Guthix.
* Unappealing UI makes the site look boring. Furthermore, users have to be comfortable with the fact that there's no "easy" content, I.e., memes and one liners.
* Comment score is mostly irrelevant, so users don't try optimizing their score. This leads to better discussion.
* Only one board. Things stay on topic, as users from that toxic subboard don't leak elsewhere. So "bad" types of users don't have a place to hang out here, unlike Facebook or Reddit.
I'm much happier commenting here than on Reddit. It's demoralizing to put effort into a comment and then be buried under one liners and memes.
For me, checking the top 10 HN stories on hckrnews with a 5 minute timer set is productive/useful, since I value being informed about major tech topics.
When I scroll endlessly for an hour+ on the front page, I'm usually avoiding something, which I'm learning is bad for my overall mental health.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com
https://hn.algolia.com/
I use them too, they are great for search. One thing I miss from Reddit though is the ability to sort comments. Yesterday during the Okta incident, I was trying to find new comments on that thread to get the latest news as I trust info here more than elsewhere.
After a decade or so on reddit and twitter, I tend towards snark and shit talking and jokes when posting online. I've received a gentle nudge or two from dang and it's so much more effective than e.g. twitter account blocking & suspensions or being summarily dismissed from a subreddit. I may drop a little quip here every now and then but generally if I don't have the time and effort available to articulate what I think without being combative, I don't post it here. It's been made clear to me that's not what this place is for.
1. I made my first submission to HN many years ago. I got an email helpfully suggesting edits to better present the content. It ended with a "Thanks for posting good things to Hacker News" - that part stuck with me, I thought it was nice.
2. I had a later submission that I thought would be an instant hit, but it didn't get traction. I emailed HN to see if it's okay to resubmit. @dang responded with tips on how to get traction, then ended the email with: "Good luck! It's hard to predict what HN will find interesting, and so few posts end up 'making it' with this audience that I hope you don't feel bad either way."
@dang is a good person that cares about HN content and the people that use it.
Is their true identity a secret? If not, can someone please point me out to their real name. I am just curious about their profile and would like to have a look at their LinkedIn or Twitter if they are on there.
I do not wish to pry open anyone's anonymity and so if their identity is a secret, I am fine with that. I honestly just want to have a look at their journey which sometimes LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHub / individual blogs provide.
I wonder what are the costs to run a community of this size (hosting and moderation) and no ads.
cant cost more than $100/month?
moderation i’d ballpark maybe 200-250k/yr. chump change for yc
Just like anything else. It really depends on who's implementing the tech and their intentions.
Need to care about ourselves and our intentions for "make the world a better place" a true reality.
Also, anecdote incoming, the largest budget I've ever had on a software project was for a "Defense" project. I'm aware that I'm a hippocrit btw and have made a ton of money from our industry and have now got to a point I am lucky enough to pick my projects to avoid questionable ones.
My point was, tech isn't trying to make the world better, we're trying to make a buck and solve interesting problems (some of which objectively make the world worse). Let's be honest with ourselves more.
Also, anecdote incoming, the largest budget I've ever had on a software project was for a "FAANG" project. I'm aware that I'm a hypocrite btw and have made a ton of money from our industry and have now got to a point I am lucky enough to pick my projects to avoid questionable ones.
My point is, tech isn't trying to advance the nasty, brutish, and short struggle of human evolution, we're trying to make a buck and solve interesting problems (some of which objectively make the world worse). Let's be honest with ourselves more.
And it's all a bunch of baloney. Unless you're solving a problem that threatens the world (climate change, disease, healthcare, hunger, poverty, homelessness, etc.), then "make the world a better place" is eye-roll worthy.
They had a fully manual setup, so I built a PXE server and automated it. Using the extra time, I browsed HN and taught myself Python (off of someone here's recommendation).
I went back to schoool in the fall and ace intro to programming, fail Organic Chemistry, and the rest was history.
I'm 25 now, starting my own company coming off of a few years in the industry and I have no idea how I would've done it without this community. You all were the anonymous angels and devils on my metaphorical shoulders.
A less toxic site is https://lobste.rs/ which reminds me the earlier days of HN, with a smaller, more thoughtful community.
But this is very subjective, I guess. From my observation, nowadays there is a bigger share of threads that aren't tech-related. Maybe this brings in a different kind of people (like myself) who lower the quality of the tech-related stuff. Just a thought...
On the first day of each term, I showed the students HN and asked them to explore the site as homework; at the beginning of the next class, I asked for their comments about it. Below are some excerpts. (The students submitted their comments in writing through an online form. Most of the rest of the semester was spent with them having HN-like discussions with each other.)
“What I found interesting about Hacker News is that there are posts relating to a variety of fields, from purely technological topics to topics that are fairly easier to get at. In that way, not only is it a platform for one to openly express their thoughts, but also a platform where one could get feedback on a topic of their interest and their take on it. The fact that there are very limited comments that are inflammatory or offensive (as far as I have read) probably makes Hacker News a viable platform for such discussions.”
“I thought that Hacker News had a decent discussion that you don't see on other sites like Twitter, where lies and trolling are prevalent, but not on Hacker News. It's a great site. The ability to reply in multiple levels is also very attractive. Not only does it allow for multiple levels of replies, but it is also very easy to read and organize, making it very easy for people to understand the comments. I think it's very important to take advantage of platforms like this to have more and more discussions and to use our time in a meaningful way as we move more and more online because of the coronavirus.”
“It is interesting to see how the people discussing are respectful of each other, unlike Twitter or YouTube comments. I think I saw something close to the right way to have a discussion.”
“I found it interesting that so many anonymous people joined online discussion which was so constructive. The contents are serious, but I feel that people can post their comment very freely and frequently since it is anonymous, so I think it encourages positive exchange of each opinions.”
“It is surprising that the discussion is proceeding properly without the existence of a certain person to control the topic or lead the discussion. Most of the users seem to be good-mannered and credible because they include actual figures in their comment and cite sources.”
“It is the first time for me to see an English BBS, so it is very fresh and interesting. I think it is good that the replies are right below the comments, because in a Japanese BBS, the comments and replies are often separated.”
They also liked the lack of advertisements. I had to point out that the launch announcements and job postings that appear on the front page, while discreet, are essentially ads and presumably help pay the bills (including @dang’s well-earned salary).
The students were put off at first, as I expected they would be, by the high level of specialized knowledge that seems to be necessary to understand the posts and discussions. I tried to help by pointing them to discussions on relatively general topics that I thought they might find interesting, such as [1, 2, 3, 4]. I also told them that nobody understands, or is interested in, everything that is discussed on HN.
I turn sixty-five in a couple of weeks, which means I am nearly a half century older than my students. One of the unique strengths of HN is that it is interesting and valuable both for me at the end of my career and for young people who have not yet started theirs.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27548204
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356141
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330953
Being threatened is never ok but dissent and different opinions are good and should be encouraged. And just to show you my point this thread comes off as a naive kid excited he's found like minded people who won't change his world view. I don't think we should be celebrating that.
HN is an advertisement product for a venture capitalist fund. None of this is being run for the benefit of humanity, or to provide a safe space for us techies to opine. It's to make a buck, which is fine ... but let's not kid ourselves about it's intent.
And I enjoy it too obviously or I wouldn't be here, but at this point i enjoy it because I get to show that not all techies share the same mind.
Also, if you feel warm and welcome, ignore me. That's the beauty of the internet, you get to pick and choose what you consume. Just don't only pick the things you agree with or that make you feel safe, that road leads to trouble.
Doubtless every time, there were also people who thought they were in a "golden age" for Hacker News. People see what they want to see, and they're all subjectively correct given their individual perspectives. If you avoid certain subjects and certain threads (or certain times of day), Hacker News seems like a bastion of civility, intellect and gravitas. Elsewhere, it's a dumpster fire. Turn showdead off and follow dang's comments if you want to see the other side of the coin here, although I wouldn't recommend it.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576431
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380300
I’m on my second company now (YC W21.) Here’s hoping to 20 more…
Thank you pg and dang!
If it wasn't free, I'd pay for it! Plenty of decent hackers, and even a few painters. ;-)
I would not be half as far in my project without HN. It’s makes me think about the European parlors and coffeehouses that fostered great European curiosity. In a digital world full of places devoid of this curiousity, it can still be found here.
Heck, this happened today, specifically with the thread regarding Colossal Cave Adventure. The top comment directed me to resources that just so happened to save me a chapter of work.
Obviously this is just my project, and I don’t expect my happiness with this development to change the lives of others, but it’s a good thing for me. It’s especially good when compared to the other places I could be; ideally I would throw my phone and laptop off a bridge and achieve inner peace.
Barring that, I’m glad to be here, and thankful for your project. It did positively affect the lives’ of others. At the risk of this comment sounding like a copypasta, I hope you understand my meaning well enough. I don’t think I’m alone in this experience here.