I've started using HN pretty recently, and already impressed by some of the not-so-common and interesting topics and discussions here. Curious to know your favorites!
I'm going to pivot my answer: it's not the best thing I've found on HN, it's how I use HN to find things.
- Ask questions about things you're unsure of, even if it's just TLAs.[1] I also like to ask for references, and those can occasionally be real gems.
- Respond to others. Especially, respond in a "yes, and..." rather than a "no, but ..." style, where that's possible.
- Avoid tendentious arguments. I'll point out corrections, but try to keep those short where possible.[2] Changing minds is ... difficult at best. Leaving clues for other readers may have value.
- Skip the main page and hit the lists: <https://news.ycombinator.com/lists>. "Best", "Invited", and "Pool" especially are worth exploring.
- If you find someone interesting, check to see what they've submitted. Often individual's submissions are interesting curations of their own, though often these fail to survive the HN queue.
- Use search. I rely on HN somewhat to search terms or individuals of interest, and to look for commentary on articles I turn up to see if there's any illuminating relevant discussion (especially older articles). This isn't always successful, but it's virtually always worth the effort, particularly using DuckDuckGo's !bang search capability: "!hn <search terms>". A blank search with a date range serves as a "best of day/week/month/year" feature (see comment below).
- Try to read the article first, or at least early in your perusal of the comments thread. Comments ... often ... deviate from and/or are only very vaguely grounded in the article itself.
- There are a lot of people shooting from the hip. There are also some absolute domain experts and Internet legends who drop by. It's quite an eclectic crowd, though the gems may be well hidden.
- You can read an individual's comments and posts from their profile. Reading the dang's (HN's moderator) comments is a good way to familiarise yourself with HN's culture and norms: <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang> You can also email mods (hn@ycombinator.com) with questions or concerns about the site and/or your account and activity.
- Karma and votes count for far less than you'd think, though they tend to filter out obvious crud pretty well.
If you're interested in things I've found interesting on HN, I've favourited far too many submissions. There might be some gems (and embarrassments) amongst those: <https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=dredmorbius>
I've also been looking at HN's historical front-page activity and have a sense of the topics which are most covered (based on classifying the submitted site). The top 20 (+ "UNCLASSIFIED") of those represent 97.6% of all front-page posts, and are:
One more trick: Use Algolia search with an unspecified term but a defined date range.
What you'll get back are the highest-voted stories for that period, sort of a best of day / week / month / year thing.
With some more fiddling you can search specific date ranges (Algolia's date-selector UI/UX is a bit fugly).
Note neither HN's voting nor its karma are especially good indicators overall quality (they tend to reflect popularity and/or posting/commenting frequency far more), but they do tend to filter out the really low-value stuff. Capturing and promoting true quality is far harder.
There are a lot of really interesting members with relatively low karma, often barely into three digits.
(I spend far too much time on the site, as I suspect most of the other leaderboard listees could claim.)
The question of what quality is is the pursuit of one HN perennial favourite, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though that book's treatment might be slightly too enigmatic.
I've been narrowing in on notion of quality as, usually and/or generally, fitness to some purpose (which might simply be enjoyment or aesthetic response, though it's often functional). One corollary of this is that quality is dependent on the applied purpose, by which point, different assessments of quality based on different purposes will come up with different values.
Again, online voting and response / interactions metrics (votes, comments, flags, reshares where such features exist) are only a very thin view on overall quality. As the meme says, when you've got an airliner and an incapacitated pilot, one skilled pilot is worth far more than a million untrained passengers. Translating this to content moderation introduces other issues: are the skilled / trained experts operating within their inherently limited areas of expertise, are they free of any compromising influences or corruption? But in general the view that "the crowd is always right" does seem to hit real limits.
In practice, HN does put its thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways, some nuanced, some not. As of 2009 there was a list of well over 1,000 banned sites, there are permanent and temporary penalties put against sites and topics, member flags, moderator actions, banned accounts, and a few (mostly slight) privileges of karma (mostly at fairly low levels). A few accounts may benefit from name recognition or be crowd favourites (pg comes to mind).
I made http://HNLikes.com to aggregate the most frequently posted links for videos, papers, code, Wikipedia articles and more in HN comments. It's a good way to discover the many classics HN users love to post.
Apologies that this is self promotion, I only share because it's relvant to the question you've asked.
I saw a posting about the U.S. digital corps. It seemed cool and my recent college grad family member seemed to fit the criteria, after like 10 months of application, interview, etc the family member started the two year program last Monday.
My favorite thing, which I don't know if I ever saved in my favorites, was a thread on your favorite HN comments.
A user linked to a thread (which I don't have saved sadly) of a different user talking about how they ordered a random unknown sweetener from somewhere internationally.
The package came by months later, and when the user opened it - white powder coated their kitchen, and their tongue.
They apparently loved the taste of it so much they carried the powder in a shaker with them everywhere. I remember them saying something along the lines of: "This stuff is so good that I haven't bothered to look up any health effects. I don't want to know. I'm fine with dying early, as long as I can keep on using this stuff."
The challenge was to figure out where in the world a given photo of a street corner shop was taken. I spent half a day on the challenge and managed to figure it out through what I believe was some combination of rookie naïvete, persistence, and sheer luck.
The moment when I found the solution felt like it was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever accomplished.
I often pick up a book recommendation or other recommendation from here.
I read Blindsight by Peter Watts after a comment recently, and it has really stuck with me. It's a sci-fi book about contact with an interstellar intelligence.
For me the real gems are usually just on-topic comment threads for topics I want to read about. It's incredible when a domain expert shows up to give us the nitty gritty, and it happens--all the time.
It was in the comments, I can't find it now dangit, but it was a person talking about thier experience writing a game engine, I wanna say it was in Zig (maybe Rust) but it was about a certain game from when they were young and this game made them want to be a programmer and make games.
Then the person that had made that game long ago responded in the comments, so the (author? OP?) original commenter went on to thank that person in an authentic way and describe to that person how their game had inspired them to become a programmer.
34 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadMine is: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Tomte&comments=t
There is also "favorite submissions", if you leave off the &comments=t
my favorites wont display common interests
- Ask questions about things you're unsure of, even if it's just TLAs.[1] I also like to ask for references, and those can occasionally be real gems.
- Respond to others. Especially, respond in a "yes, and..." rather than a "no, but ..." style, where that's possible.
- Avoid tendentious arguments. I'll point out corrections, but try to keep those short where possible.[2] Changing minds is ... difficult at best. Leaving clues for other readers may have value.
- Skip the main page and hit the lists: <https://news.ycombinator.com/lists>. "Best", "Invited", and "Pool" especially are worth exploring.
- If you find someone interesting, check to see what they've submitted. Often individual's submissions are interesting curations of their own, though often these fail to survive the HN queue.
- Use search. I rely on HN somewhat to search terms or individuals of interest, and to look for commentary on articles I turn up to see if there's any illuminating relevant discussion (especially older articles). This isn't always successful, but it's virtually always worth the effort, particularly using DuckDuckGo's !bang search capability: "!hn <search terms>". A blank search with a date range serves as a "best of day/week/month/year" feature (see comment below).
- Try to read the article first, or at least early in your perusal of the comments thread. Comments ... often ... deviate from and/or are only very vaguely grounded in the article itself.
- There are a lot of people shooting from the hip. There are also some absolute domain experts and Internet legends who drop by. It's quite an eclectic crowd, though the gems may be well hidden.
- You can read an individual's comments and posts from their profile. Reading the dang's (HN's moderator) comments is a good way to familiarise yourself with HN's culture and norms: <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang> You can also email mods (hn@ycombinator.com) with questions or concerns about the site and/or your account and activity.
- Karma and votes count for far less than you'd think, though they tend to filter out obvious crud pretty well.
If you're interested in things I've found interesting on HN, I've favourited far too many submissions. There might be some gems (and embarrassments) amongst those: <https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=dredmorbius>
I've also been looking at HN's historical front-page activity and have a sense of the topics which are most covered (based on classifying the submitted site). The top 20 (+ "UNCLASSIFIED") of those represent 97.6% of all front-page posts, and are:
There's so much to explore! And these tips, hacks, and tricks are SO specific and useful. Thank you for taking the time to share this. Super valuable.
What you'll get back are the highest-voted stories for that period, sort of a best of day / week / month / year thing.
With some more fiddling you can search specific date ranges (Algolia's date-selector UI/UX is a bit fugly).
Note neither HN's voting nor its karma are especially good indicators overall quality (they tend to reflect popularity and/or posting/commenting frequency far more), but they do tend to filter out the really low-value stuff. Capturing and promoting true quality is far harder.
There are a lot of really interesting members with relatively low karma, often barely into three digits.
(I spend far too much time on the site, as I suspect most of the other leaderboard listees could claim.)
But yes, you're exceptionally good at this. Super impressive! Thank you, again :)
I've been narrowing in on notion of quality as, usually and/or generally, fitness to some purpose (which might simply be enjoyment or aesthetic response, though it's often functional). One corollary of this is that quality is dependent on the applied purpose, by which point, different assessments of quality based on different purposes will come up with different values.
Again, online voting and response / interactions metrics (votes, comments, flags, reshares where such features exist) are only a very thin view on overall quality. As the meme says, when you've got an airliner and an incapacitated pilot, one skilled pilot is worth far more than a million untrained passengers. Translating this to content moderation introduces other issues: are the skilled / trained experts operating within their inherently limited areas of expertise, are they free of any compromising influences or corruption? But in general the view that "the crowd is always right" does seem to hit real limits.
In practice, HN does put its thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways, some nuanced, some not. As of 2009 there was a list of well over 1,000 banned sites, there are permanent and temporary penalties put against sites and topics, member flags, moderator actions, banned accounts, and a few (mostly slight) privileges of karma (mostly at fairly low levels). A few accounts may benefit from name recognition or be crowd favourites (pg comes to mind).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740357
Apologies that this is self promotion, I only share because it's relvant to the question you've asked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423
A user linked to a thread (which I don't have saved sadly) of a different user talking about how they ordered a random unknown sweetener from somewhere internationally.
The package came by months later, and when the user opened it - white powder coated their kitchen, and their tongue.
They apparently loved the taste of it so much they carried the powder in a shaker with them everywhere. I remember them saying something along the lines of: "This stuff is so good that I haven't bothered to look up any health effects. I don't want to know. I'm fine with dying early, as long as I can keep on using this stuff."
I really wish I could find this comment again.
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566
The sweetener mentioned is Neotame
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571886
The challenge was to figure out where in the world a given photo of a street corner shop was taken. I spent half a day on the challenge and managed to figure it out through what I believe was some combination of rookie naïvete, persistence, and sheer luck.
The moment when I found the solution felt like it was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever accomplished.
I read Blindsight by Peter Watts after a comment recently, and it has really stuck with me. It's a sci-fi book about contact with an interstellar intelligence.
It's free online.
https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
For me the real gems are usually just on-topic comment threads for topics I want to read about. It's incredible when a domain expert shows up to give us the nitty gritty, and it happens--all the time.
There's also always this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
Then the person that had made that game long ago responded in the comments, so the (author? OP?) original commenter went on to thank that person in an authentic way and describe to that person how their game had inspired them to become a programmer.
It was really neat to read.
Adam Morse's updated color palette: https://clrs.cc/
This really cool color scale generator: https://hihayk.github.io/scale/#4/6/50/80/-51/67/20/14/1D9A6...
i have many failed attempts but i keep tryjng in being a founder, thank you hn i love u