Hacker News – The Good Parts
34 comments
·October 16, 2025thegrim33
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
keyboardJones
Just want to pop in to agree with the author. Thanks for making this a great virtual space, everyone!
Night_Thastus
I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had:
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
flobosg
> The ability to save comments
Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
CaptainOfCoit
> * Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
tempestn
And it actually does avoid duplicates in the short term, as long as the submitted url is identical. I'm not sure what the time threshold is exactly, but I know if you resubmit something that has been submitted in the past few days, it will count it as a vote on the original instead.
n4r9
To favourite a comment, click its timestamp and then click "favourite" just after "flag".
You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
Night_Thastus
Wow. That is very not intuitive. It's like an anti-pattern.
Good to know though, thank you!
vavooom
I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!
tonymet
* sort by controversial
molticrystal
I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links would be nice, but no image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
dismalaf
HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
tptacek
As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation.
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
abuani
There are still a select few subreddits where this is true as well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes worthless
tptacek
AskHistorians is still pretty great too.
ChrisArchitect
Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here very quickly. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
bilekas
If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
nadermx
Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
kylecazar
I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
mattgreenrocks
Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).
validatori
One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.
tptacek
That's an anti-goal of HN; everybody shares the same front page here.
ayaros
Good post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself. It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I want to the CSS.
pedalpete
I've always just described HN as a more focused version of a sub-reddit with a start-up/technology/engineering angle.
fishmicrowaver
it's basically what digg should've been
dingnuts
careful comparing the orange site to Reddit; you'll anger the natives
tech234a
See also: the last paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.