Ask HN: What's the best thing you came across on Hacker News?
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!
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
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
Mine 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
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...
Apologies that this is self promotion, I only share because it's relvant to the question you've asked.
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.
- 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:
Class Stories Votes (mean) Comments (mean)
UNCLASSIFIED: 63543 12353558 194.41 5492437 86.44
blog: 22711 4023053 177.14 1882979 82.91
general news: 15144 2927086 193.28 1904722 125.77
tech news: 13883 2254571 162.40 1261577 90.87
programming: 12856 2814625 218.93 957105 74.45
corporate comm.: 8655 2092856 241.81 981934 113.45
academic / science: 8463 1451758 171.54 609273 71.99
n/a: 7294 1143594 156.79 848020 116.26
business news: 5327 934668 175.46 695350 130.53
general interest: 3846 683416 177.70 395366 102.80
social media: 2151 707530 328.93 372925 173.37
software: 2085 466503 223.74 188013 90.17
technology: 1613 292982 181.64 133882 83.00
video: 1463 249221 170.35 94161 64.36
general info (wiki): 1144 180039 157.38 72192 63.10
government: 1009 274549 272.10 162660 161.21
misc documents: 724 127352 175.90 54601 75.42
law: 720 183559 254.94 66061 91.75
tech discussion: 702 128731 183.38 52805 75.22
science news: 625 94731 151.57 48919 78.27
general discussion: 609 180094 295.72 82509 135.48
Other: 4315
Total: 178882
Edits: A few late tweaks and additions partially based on my follow-up comment below.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Three letter acronyms. See also ETLAs (extended TLAs) and DETLAs (double-extended ...).
2. There are ... many ... exceptions to this. It's a goal and aspiration, not an accomplishment.
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=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 have many failed attempts but i keep tryjng in being a founder, thank you hn i love u