Hacker News Highlights | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Highlights

news.ycombinator.com

256 pointsnickt44 comments

dang explained the list here[0]. It looks like it's a curated list of comments, rather than algorithmic like the other pages.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668249

In case you don’t visit the above link and discover the lists page[1] in the response, you may discover some other lists you didn’t know existed (like I didn’t).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

    asknew The latest Ask HN (i.e. text) posts
    shownew The latest Show HN posts

Could we have in addition to those:

    bestask     Highest rated Ask HN 
    bestshow    Highest rated Show HN

And of course "best" could simply mean: "all, ordered by descending number of points".

That would be pretty cool.

I was unaware, so thanks! TIL that a throwaway account has the 66th highest karma among commenters

Is a 6 year old account that posts submissions and comments regularly really throwaway?

technically they're all throw away after the heat death of the universe

I know /lists, but it doesn't include /highlights for some reason.

What are the other pages that don't show on the top navbar unless you're already there?

/upvoted /submitted /favorites /hidden are on your profile page, but clearly there's a few more.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...

> However, in maintaining its simplicity, many new features and behaviors added over the years on Hacker News are not fully documented other than the occasional comments from staff.

Ahahaha what?!? That is the opposite of "simplicity". Instead of exposing the functionality, it is hidden away but still active, and to know how it works you have to hunt through potentially thousands of comments, which might already have been obsoleted by later comments.

What's wrong with just having a help page? Or a sitemap? Sitemaps are pretty old school, they should be right up HN's alley, no?

And verily, it was bequeathed that only the high priests and priestesses may sup from the hamburger menu of The YC Lord's bountiful functionality.

Afaik HN is built around the idea of being as hard to use as possible, to avoid becoming Reddit.

You can find them at the "lists" link at the bottom of HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Interestingly, “highlights” is not there.

Huh, what's the difference between /{top,best}comments?

"Classic" is not there.

/active is the real Hacker News front page IMO

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?

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.

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!

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".

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

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

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).

Too much fun to see myself in this list, and especially because it links to a story where I explained that "fire an event" is a weed reference...

There's some amazing, magical humanity in there.

I still find it surprising that HN doesn't offer RSS feed(s). I consume mostly all my daily web content via RSS. Right now, I use a service hosted on github.io - it works well, but there's always this second-handedness about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

This seems to exist.

What is APL? I searched for “APL database” and didn’t find anything that seemed related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

> APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array ... In 1979, Iverson received the Turing Award for his work on APL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)

> The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is an array programming language based primarily on APL (also by Iverson). To avoid repeating the APL special-character problem, J uses only the basic ASCII character set ... J is a very terse array programming language, and is most suited to mathematical and statistical programming, especially when performing operations on matrices ... Since March 2011, J is free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).

jrockway and clay_shirky stand out to me :)

I'm sorry it looks like some creepy list of comments that dox the commenter. Even dang highlighted one of his own comment, where he doxes someone else who commented in the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28940228

You keep using that word.. I do not think it means what you think it means

It's a list of comments where people reveal personal information about themselves.

Purposefully posting things about yourself isn't doxxing, nor is linking to a post of somebody posting personal information about themselves. They publicly posted it, they're fine with it being public.

OK but I still think it's creepy to track a list of what people have said about themselves.

It's a collection of interesting anecdotes. Most people are flattered when others find their anecdotes interesting.

I think you've just described all social media. :)

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