Ask HN: Favorite/Classic HN threads of all time | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favorite/Classic HN threads of all time

162 pointscaaqil54 comments

The only similar thread that I could find was from 2012 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652), so I decided to start one. Please share your all-time favorite HN threads here.

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I was going to post this standalone, but will post it here. I was recently reading the Hacker News initial reaction to Facebook acquiring Instagram in 2012:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840

One of the commenters says it will be the equivalent to Google buying YouTube. To which another commenter replies "bookmark this comment, see you in 2022". And here we are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055

Such confidence while having no way to know if they would be right (because, no matter the arguments, they were trying to predict the future).

If they were wrong, the comment would have continued rotting away unnoticed. But they got lucky and were right -- confirmation bias is a wonderful thing.

Right? I do think Instagram was one of the acquisitions of the decade.

Nitpick: this is technically survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

My favorite part is that a comment thread further down convinced that 'we're in a 2nd bubble now more than ever.'.

A decade later, nothing much has changed it seems.

Probably still ranks #1 in ultimate HN comebacks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Came here to post that one as my all time favorite. Since you posted that one, I’ll give another classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 (“I have qualms with Dropbox because Linux users could just X and Y and Z…”)

For people who are new here (like me): cperciva >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Percival

Lurking in a sibling thread is Colin speaking with Drew Houston (of Dropbox fame):

> we're in a similar space -- http://www.getdropbox.com (and part of the yc summer 07 program)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088

In an alternative universe, Colin joined Dropbox and their UI would have been much more hardcore with better the whole product having better support for other OSes than just Windows and macOS!

This is a great comeback. But I don't understand the reference to Ravi Vakil. Is Ravi known for being humble or something?

I’d wager sanj@ is a sibling of Ravi Vakil, from a quick LinkedIn search. Still, a little perplexing appeal to authority there.

That's his brother. The poster's name is Sanjay Vakil. I think he's saying - look at my brother. He is so successful and intelligent. Unless you have won the putnam (his bro was a 4 time putnam fellow), you have no right to be bolder than him.

As an aside, I think Sanjay has an inferiority complex or can't see outside of his immediate circle who knows his brother.

I'm a little lost, what makes it a good comeback

Someone sarcastically asked if he'd won a difficult math competition due to his self-grandourous parent comment.

His response was, yes, yes he had won the difficult competition they referenced.

TIL that handles stay green forever in early comments. I assumed they lost the green indicator after the account had weathered.

It’s a great one. I have to say I also love sanj’s “Totally busted. Just the once, though, huh?” response.

I sell onions on the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 I keep coming back to read this every once in a while.

appreciate that (peter here).. the 2022 Vidalia crop is planted, and we recently trimmed the tops.. I posted some pics here if you're curious: https://www.vidaliaonions.com/farm-news/trimming-vidalia-oni...

Look at those blue skies. Looks great

https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ is a good list

I've been saving interesting threads and comments in my favorites (they are in my profile). Many old-timers are surprised that Hacker News has a favorite feature. Comments are tricky: to favorite a comment you need to first show its details by clicking on the timestamp.

Now, for the links. A lot of freelancing and consulting advice threads have a good discussion and stories from the trenches:

Starting as a consultant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189801

Getting paid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817193

Common mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728436

Lessons learned from a veteran developer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25658216

Branding and marketing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23282278

Hiring a personal assistant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234

Other pretty cool and fun threads:

Crowdsourced HN book recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

Product recommendations from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29353980

What 4chan thinks of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373

The comment thread about a developer of a high level of mathematic ability who wrote and maintained a widely used piece of software used for backups. Someone commented something to the effect of “He gave up on solving Millennium problems to write backup software”.

And in so doing, saving the world orders of magnitude more in $$$ than he could have won solving a Millenium problem.

This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865

Yes that was it. Thanks for providing the link.

I looked on my hard drive to see what I saved and there were two, other than the usual technical saves:

Why Hacker News Thinks PHP Won Something (2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438871

Unfortunately the article appears to have been scrubbed from gilesbowkett.blogspot.com and is not on the Wayback machine. Basically, the article trashes PHP and Hacker News, which I thought was interesting.

and

The company that has a monopoly on ice cream truck music (2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24744879

Fred, that coworker who never stops refactoring:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120359

I will never stop being Fred, but this thread keeps me from confusing my drive to refactor with what the company actually needs. Particularly these comments:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120713

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121018

It's a job posting, but I think about Dear Future Homejoy Engineer near the end of every year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956

Are you saying this is a good post or a stupid post?

That CEO was a POS for making his employees work Christmas

Thread posted on Dec 25, 2014.

"Homejoy shut down on July 31, 2015." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homejoy)

This is incredibly cringeworthy - for a company CEO to brag about employees working through Christmas. Just wow.

The famous Alan Kay appearance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851

All passive income threads

Care to share your favorites?

Yes I'd also love to see those!

Tagging onto this

You have the “favorite” function for this.

I don't have a favorite. There's a whole series of relative posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131501443

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12318449

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146930

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11026699

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21389776

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583312

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3770510

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18906094

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11755036

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27107919

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316912

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726489

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15483692

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24859111

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29766034

The Dropbox launch post is a great example of why you shouldn’t take (particularly dismissive) comments here too seriously. (This isn’t to dunk on any of the contributors there - but just a reminder that we’re all fallible and have biases)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

On that note, PG coining “middlebrow dismissal” isn’t a very elaborate comment, but is a term that has entered a few people’s lexicon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248

Both the article and the comments here have some good life info (“I Thought I Would Have Accomplished More Today and Also Before I Was 35”)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24316725

Also, check out the top posts all time, and top comments all time.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The algolia results are not that accurate unfortunately

Correct—those 'top comments' search results are many years out of date because we stopped publishing comment scores many years ago.

We should probably ask Algolia to stop offering that search option for comments.

Thanks for the response, dang. I wish I could list my own comments/submissions ranked by score.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com I can look it up for you.

Could you consider showing comment scores once comments are a certain number of days old? Being able to see highly ranked comments across all posts is interesting.

The parent comment is the one coining the term, not pg.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726218

It was pg's coinage, but I don't know where he first used it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 was the first time on HN, a few weeks before the link you mention. I think he might have introduced it in an essay before that, though.

We use the term 'shallow dismissal' in HN moderation instead—arguably a bit of a euphemistic move, but for moderation purposes it's a lot better to talk about the post than about the person. The word 'shallow' makes that clearer than the word 'middlebrow' does.

> The Dropbox launch post is a great example of why you shouldn’t take (particularly dismissive) comments here too seriously

This mentality is still thriving on HN

Just yesterday someone complained that Clearview AI would only honor removal requests for California or EU residents.

So of course someone responded that they should just buy some property in California, establish residency, and then they’d be able to complete the request.

"This mentality is still thriving on HN"

Good!

"So of course someone responded that they should just buy some property in California, establish residency, and then they’d be able to complete the request."

I am looking at the name of this website and I see that the name of this website is "hacker news".

I mean I saw a lot of people saying they can use FTP and this and that but people moved on from FTP to hosting files on other sites back then like RapidShare, MegaUpload and so on. I know I used to share code and projects on RapidShare before it disappeared.

I do agree there are biases and sometimes people miss that they are commenting not from the perspective of the general population. Its nice you can setup ftp and this and that, but the common man has no time or interest for that. They want easy to use. Look at Facebook, the top way to share family photos and even holiday cards. I can only imagine without Facebook we would see way more holiday cards.

My top filesharing utility is WhatsApp, or maybe Telegram, both for sending stuff to others and myself. Sure I know how to use an FTP server, operate multiple HTTP servers I can upload to, and have accounts at Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. But for low-risk one-to-one communication the quick solution wins. Back then that might have been Dropbox.

I’m talking about before WhatsApp existed when they were pitching Dropbox.

I took a look through the Dropbox launch comments. I understand that there's a meme of someone creating something, everyone responding by being dismissive and then it being a massive success. However, reading that comments section, I think it's really quite positive and constructive. Sure, someone says "I could do the same with XYZ" but if you look at all the comments, or even all of the comment of the person providing the alternative, it's an overwhelmingly positive response. If you post your project on HN and someone goes "this is great but how are you going to cope if 10,000 users sign up tomorrow" I think you should be pretty happy.

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