Hacker News Reader

Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

How is that different from https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments?

/bestcomments is a mechanical ranking by upvote count, so 'best' is a misnomer.

/highlights is a manually curated list, designed for overlooked gems. If you or anyone notices an overlooked gem, from now or any time in the past, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll add it!

Aren’t manual curators biased towards their beliefs? What makes a comment a “gem” from the perspective of a curator?

It looks like one is a gem when it's by the maker of the thing under discussion, especially if it's an unexpected surprise!

Absolutely - there are all sorts of amazing comments like that buried in HN's archives.

That’s how I tell others about HN usually: it’s a news aggregator with comments for nerds, but the cool thing is, often someone chimes in and says "I was on the team who did this and here’s some more/different background info".

This isn't free speech. This is someone's website. They can have opinions. They can be different than yours. Right?

Sure they are. The word "curate" comes from "care". That's a subjective feeling! However, it's not so subjective that other people can't share it, and that's what makes these things fun to share.

From my perspective, a 'gem' would be a post that has something rare and interesting about it, and perhaps also touching or beautiful.

Tangentially related, out of curiosity: Are all or perhaps only specific comments limited to a maximum of 75 points, or is it simply a coincidence that mine have never seemed to get more upvotes beyond that score?

Last year, my HN comments ranged from −4 to +76, with one outlier at +283.

(Methodology/source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547760.)

Interesting thanks for sharing. I just upvoted that comment of yours as well, stalebots are indeed the worst!

Funnily a comment I posted yesterday just passed the 75 points, so it appears that either there is no cap or that it was lifted.

There are no such limits so it must be a coincidence!

Not sure about a comprehensive list of differences, but, for one, /highlights page shows all comments there in a chronological order of when they were posted (while /bestcomments doesn't).

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