Hacker News is a perfect example of the "Worse is better" mantra applied to social engineering. I mean, slashdot had more features and functionality in the late 1990s.
What makes HN work is the tight focus and heavy moderation.
What makes HN work is the tight focus and heavy moderation.
Backend services in languages other than Hack do exist, of course. When I left Meta (then called Facebook) in 2019, they were almost exclusively in C++. Now I don’t know for sure but I think Rust is gaining a lot of popularity for non-Hack stuff.
I’m not sure what you mean about the GraphQL question. Meta doesn’t use Node at all, or at least not to any significant extent.
One of the original motivating examples were Unix-like systems (simple implementation, few correctness guarantees in interfaces) vs. Lisp-based systems (often well specified interfaces, but with complicated implementations as the cost.)
https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
> One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good.
He then wrote Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html) for his EuroPAL keynote speech
> JWZ excerpted the worse-is-better sections [from Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big] and sent them to his friends at CMU, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, who sent them to their friends everywhere.
The excerpt: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
The lisp path won, Lispus instead of Linux, and we had AGI in 1997 due to code elegance.
Edit: or as someone else who has phrased it better: "less is more".
At least, that's how my bash pager has it in the manpage.
I also thought Slashdot's moderation system was kind of fun. I am not sure it was useful but I enjoyed the annotations (+5 Funny when serious, +5 Insightful when inciteful, etc.) Meta-moderation was also neat?
In terms of Slashdot groupthink, no one uses (used) Windows and Microsoft was about to fall, but when looking outside of that at computer sales vs counted Linux installs, the picture was and is still very different. The reverse happened on the server, but Nadella was able to see outside the groupthink bringing Azure to the success it enjoys today.
ETA: obligatory: /s
Slashdot's moderation system didn't lead people to think "no one used windows", the userbase just didn't like microsoft.
Beyond that, having to re-debate every single idea every single time it's brought up is inefficient to the point of uselessness. We, as individuals, don't have time to verify every single theory from first principles, so we rely on tools like "moderation" as a heuristic to make progress.
HN has some very clear bubbles that probably wouldn't happen without a popularity system tied to its comments and submissions; maybe the janitorial duty of removing spam and so on is enough for a page like this. I'm not sure I see the merits of upvotes and downvotes at this point.
I completely disagree. That was a very coherent and well articulated comment. Having a useful vocabulary is not the equivalent of using a bunch of buzzwords.
Voting effects the presentation order of comments, which is especially significant when there are many responses sharing an immediate parent.
That's probably a bigger impact from voting than making points publicly viewable would be
(I think the best argument against the groupthing argument here is how inconsistent the positions are that are claimed to be the “groupthink” position by those claiming that.)
Aren’t you countering yourself by not providing the research requested above though?
I mean without objective evidence it’s all just a subjective opinion on either side
I'm not against memes and jokes, I like them. But I also like some actual intelligent discussion in between.
And that's why right now I visit Hacker News and it's been many years since I used Slashdot.
But I agree dark mode would be nice.
Being able to check a profile box would be a lot easier.
Then on the phone, Safari is again the default browser, but if I click a link from the gmail app it opens in mobile Chrome.
So to use a plugin to change anything, I'd have to have the plugin on all five browsers.
So there's still an element of who says it that matters
These go in your ublock origin "my filters" section. Enables Dark Mode through CSS, and another filter restricts the width of comments.
I don't mean this against designer specifically. I've seen plenty of software engineers that do the same thing. Hell, I've caught myself doing the same thing. It's just part of being human, but recognizing our human nature and not doing dumb things because of it is an ideal to shoot for in my opinion.
* Triple ticks for code ```
* Bullet lists
Not as clumsy or random as a Markdown; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
Annoyingly enough it's been talked about for years but it never gets implemented, despite only three colors really needing a swap: background to dark sepia or just dark gray, and text to white and off-white.
For users without an account you just stick to prefers-color-scheme. For users with an account you add a setting 'disable dark mode'
Dark Reader has autodetection so those users won't be a problem either.
And if you really wanna keep to the identity of the site, the top bar doesn't even really need a color swap.
It really is less of a conundrum than you think.
The Browser also has controls. Good Browsers let you set your browser-wide choice differently from your OS-wide choice. Great Browsers let you pick per-site overrides directly, as a standard user setting in a consistent location in browser controls. I realize a lot of UX designers have come to much prefer the "add more controls" approach over the "teach a person to fish" / understand how your OS and browser controls work as the user of the site approach. I realize why a lot of UX designers will always prefer that approach, because teaching people is hard and it is easier to cut complaints off at the pass than answer complaints with "use your browser's settings".
But seriously, it should be fine to release a dark mode in 2025 that only responds to `prefers-color-scheme: dark` and leaves it to users to understand their OS and Browser tools. It irks me a lot more when sites like Wikipedia and Bing and Google ignore `prefers-color-scheme: dark` by default and makes you dig for some dumb website-specific control (that's in a different place on every website) just to set it to whatever they call "System default" that means "trust the Browser's prefers-color-scheme, I know what I'm doing". UX designers have taken something that should be natural and automatic and made it more complex and more confusing just because a small handful of users complain that they don't understand their OS and Browser Settings tools.
The idea of "Dark mode" as a "feature" annoys me more than it probably should. Because it highlights how proper separation of content and presentation has been ruined by the so-called modern web, by modern web devs that don't get it.
The website is supposed to provide content, not presentation. Presentation is a user-agent feature. If you want to read a site with bright yellow font on a purple background, that should be your decision and yours alone. Configure your user agent with that color scheme and done.
By hardcoding presentation into the content, the "modern" (regressed) web removes functionality from the user. So now the user is relegated to begging the developers to implement particular color schemes like "dark mode", which doesn't make any sense.
Maybe now it's been ported to Common Lisp it'll be easier to add features.
The flag button?
Really? IIRC, Slashdot's moderation was garbage, remember penis-bird, GNAA, goatse?
But yes, I remember that to see that stuff you had to expand the down-modded comments.
That stuff was also a product of its time. Slashdot had the strong free speech ethos of the early internet, so CmdrTaco had a policy of never deleting comments unless they broke the site somehow or there was a legal process requiring it. Sometimes that meant very new stories would get these comments and they'd be visible before they got modded, but if you browsed stories that had been active for a little while you wouldn't see them.
One downside of a sophisticated moderation system on a site designed for programmers is that some people take it as a challenge. The reason Slashdot trolling was a bunch of dumb memes rather than e.g. commercial ads is because a lot of bored teenagers found spamming it a good way to learn web programming. The systematic nature of the moderation meant that it was a system to beat, a game to conquer. Hence the brief influx of "page widening posts" and other technical hacks. But I don't know if you'd see the same stuff today. The culture has changed, there are much better ways to learn programming and way more opportunities now. And you don't have to be fully automated. CmdrTaco had a strongly systems-oriented streak, but the problem on HN is hardly ever the actions of dang and the other paid moderators, it's really abuse of the overly simple system by other users that's a problem. You could have both good paid moderators and stricter controls on user moderation.
HN has ads? I've been on some 2011 and I have never seen them...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Hacker News is the opposite and the better for it. If you're openly promoting your work, awesome! If you're doing anything to attempt to manipulate the platform for PR reasons, you can bet you will be punished for it.
I never understood why Reddit, which always tried to give off the "for the little guy" vibes was so rabidly against anyone promoting their own work.
Reddit hasn't been 'for the little guy' for a decade, that's why they have to try so hard to give off those vibes.
> Reddit would aggressively remove self promotion in most subs while clearly running major PR campaigns under the guise of organic content.
Yep, this is why they do this. They're removing competition (in the form of ads they weren't paid for) to boost their product (ads they were paid for).
In terms of paid advertising I guess the whole of HN kind of advertises YC who fund it.
Then again, Im not in CS so the job by boards posts are never interesting to me
"worse is better" is people putting up with footguns like this in python, because it's percieved easier to find a python job:
def fun(a = []):
> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.
For that reason, I think I am applying the term precisely as it was defined.
The irony of my comment, which dang picked up, is that the original idea was a criticism against Lisp, suggesting that the bloat of features was a part of the reason its adoption had lagged behind languages like C.
Swiss army knives are not as good at being screwdrivers as screwdrivers are.
People write a lot of Python, because the language is easy to get into for a lot of non computer-science folks (e.g., engineers and scientists) and the ecosystem is massive with libraries for so many important things. It isn't as conceptually pure as lisp, but most probably don't care.
Maybe you were blessed with colleagues, for the past 14 years, that all know about how dangerous it is to do it in Python so they use workarounds? That doesn't negate the fact that it's a concern, though, does it?
The idea in Python is:
1. Statements are executed line by line in order (statement by statement).
2. One of the statements is "def", which executes a definition.
3. Whatever arguments you have are strictly evaluated. For example f(g(h([]))), it evaluates [] (yielding a new empty list), then evaluates h([]) (always, no matter whether g uses it), then evaluates g(...), then evaluates f(...).
So if you have
def foo(x = []): ...
that immediately defines
foo = (lambda x = []: ...)
For that, it has to immediately evaluate [] (like it always does anywhere!). So how is this not exactly what it should do?
Some people complain about the following:
class A:
x = 3
y = x + 2
For example:
a = A()
assert a.__class__.x == 3
assert a.x == 3
a.__class__.x = 10
b = A()
assert b.x == 10
But it just evaluates each line in the class definition statement by statement when defining the class. Simple!
Complicating the Python evaluation model (that's in effect what you are implying) is not worth doing. And in any case, changing the evaluation model of the world's most used programming language (and in production in all countries of the world) in 2025 or any later date is a no go right there.
If you want a complicated (more featureful) evaluation model, just use C++ or Ruby. Sometimes they are the right choice.
When a linter warns me about such an expression, it usually means that even if it doesn't blow up, it increases the cognitive load for anyone reviewing or maintaining the code (including future me). And I'm not religious — if I can't easily rewrite the expression in an obviously safe way, I just concede that its safety is not 100% obvious and add a nolint comment with explanation.
> For that, it has to immediately evaluate [] (like it always does anywhere!). So how is this not exactly what it should do?
It has a lambda there. In many programming languages, and the way human beings read this, say that "when there is a lambda, whatever is inside is evaluated only when you call it". Python evaluating default arguments at definition time is a clear footgun that leads to many bugs.
Now, there is no way of fixing it now, without probably causing other bugs and years of backwards compatibility problems. But it is good that people are aware that it is an error in design, so new programming languages don't fall into the same error.
For an equivalent error that did get fixed, many Lisps used to have dynamic scoping for variables instead of lexical scoping. It was people critizing that decision that lead to pretty much all modern programming languages to use lexical scoping, including python.
What is inside the lambda is to the right of the ":". That is indeed evaluated only when you call it.
>But it is good that people are aware that it is an error in design, so new programming languages don't fall into the same error.
Python didn't "fall" into that "error". That was a deliberate design decision and in my opinion it is correct. Scheme is the same way, too.
Note that you only have a "problem" if you mutate the list (instead of functional programming) which would be weird to do in 2025.
>For an equivalent error that did get fixed, many Lisps used to have dynamic scoping for variables instead of lexical scoping. It was people critizing that decision that lead to pretty much all modern programming languages to use lexical scoping, including python.
Both are pretty useful (and both are still there, especially in Python and Lisp!). I see what you mean, though: lexical scoping is a better default for local variables.
But having weird lazy-sometimes evaluation would NOT be a better default.
If you had it, when exactly would it force the lazy evaluation?
def g():
print('HA')
return 7
def f(x=lazy: [g()]):
pass
def f(x=lazy: [g()]):
print(x)
def f(x=lazy: [g()]):
if False:
print(x)
def f(x=lazy: [g()]):
if random() > 42: # If random() returns a value from 0 to 1
print(x)
def f(x=lazy: [g()]):
if random() > 42:
print(x)
else:
print(x)
print(x)
def f(x=lazy: [g()]):
x = 3
if random() > 42:
print(x)
Think about the implications of what you are suggesting.
Thankfully, we do have "lazy" and it's called "lambda" and it does what you would expect:
If you absolutely need it (you don't :P) you can do it explicitly:
def f(x=None, x_defaulter=lambda: []):
x = x if x is not None else x_defaulter()
def f(x=None):
x = x if x is not None else []
Guido van Rossum would (correctly) veto anything that hid control flow from the user like having a function call sometimes evaluate the defaulter and sometimes not.
Yes, the fact that most people learn very early the correct way to have a constant value of a mutable type used when an explicit argument is not given and that using a mutable value directly as a default argument value uses a mutable value shared between invocations (which is occasionally desirable) means that the way those two things are done in Python isn't a substantial problem.
(And, no, I don't think a constant mutable list is actually all that commonly needed as a default argument in most languages where mutable and immutable iterables share a common interface; if you are actually mutating the argument, it is probably not an optional argument, if you aren't mutating it, an immutable value -- like a python tuple -- works fine.)
Exactly because it's a footgun that everybody hits very early. I think the Python linters even flag this.
The fact that default arguments in Python get set to "None" is precisely because of this.
The bigger problem is with dicts and sets because they don't have the equivalent concise representation for the immutable alternative.
Arguably the even bigger problem is that Python collection literals produce mutable collections by default. And orthogonal to that but contributing to the problem is that the taxonomy of collections is very disorganized. For example, an immutable equivalent of set is frozenset - well and good. But then you'd expect the immutable equivalent of list to be frozenlist, except it's tuple! And the immutable equivalent of dict isn't frozendict, it... doesn't actually exist at all in the Python stdlib (there's typing.MappingProxyType which provides a readonly wrapper around any mapping including dicts, but it will still reflect the changes done through the original dict instance, so to make an equivalent of frozenset you need to copy the dict first and then wrap it and discard all remaining references).
Most of this can be reasonably explained by piecemeal evolution of the language, but by now there's really no excuse to not have frozendict, nor to provide an equally concise syntax for all immutable collections, nor to provide better aliases and more uniform API (e.g. why do dicts have copy() but lists do not?).
I helped shepherd a bug fix into Python that was less than a dozen lines, dead simple, completely obvious, sorely needed and still took 3 years and a summoning of Guido, himself, to get it shoved through. Because there was no designated maintainer for that section of code, people were absolutely terrified of touching the code even though it was completely obvious that the fix was backwards compatible. It finally hit the latest Python and a bunch of other projects immediately removed their workarounds for the bug.
If it was that difficult to get a super small, super obvious bugfix through, trying to get a "frozendict" into the language is going to be a Sisyphean task.
The bigger problem is that there was already a PEP (https://peps.python.org/pep-0416/) about that, and it was rejected for wonderful reasons such as "multiple threads can agree by convention not to mutate a shared dict, there’s no great need for enforcement" and "there are existing idioms for avoiding mutable default values".
So while it's a footgun you will be writing some weird code to actually trigger it.
Seems fine to me. If the default expression causes side effects, then that's what I would expect.
>This kind of function is fine in Python because it's unidiomatic to mutate your parameters, you do obj.mutate() not mutate(obj).
I first wrote Python over 10 years ago and I never learned this.
How would you idiomatically write a function/method which mutates >1 parameter?
If you want to mutate two parameters just pass them to a function like you normally would.
It's sloppy and a bad habit, I would not let it pass a PR in production code. Probably OK for a throwaway script.
A common case where you would have a free function which mutates its parameter would be a function which takes a file handle but it's also the case that you wouldn't have a mutable default for this value.
def fun(a = None):
_a = a if a is not None else []But I don't value the look and feel of Hackernews, because it drives people away -- as if these people are of lesser value. That is just elitist and gatekeeper mentality.
This sounds good in theory until you realize just who it is that is being "gatekept".
Peruse through any sufficiently large Discord server or the comments on a YouTube Shorts / Instagram Reels video to see what our fellow "valued internet compatriots" are up to.
I, for one, have had enough of dealing with neuron-fried dopamine addicts and literal children from those aforementioned circles to last me a lifetime, I'd prefer HN doesn't become (more) like that.
There's always Reddit for those who prefer a community with the front gates blasted wide open.
I think it's more likely that most people (even most tech-adjacent people) simply don't know this place exists, or don't care, since no one is sharing links to Hacker News on mainstream social media and nothing goes viral here outside of already established HN-adjacent circles.
It's like they know somewhere deep inside that "mo tech" is not helping anyone.
- technologists and startup wannabes feeling like HN is "underground" because of the stripped down aesthetic and weird tech stack
- out of touch VCs who are successful because of money and connections but want to cosplay as technical
- the end users of the startups, who are fed the enshittified products funded by the VCs and created by the technologists
But I think HN built on what Reddit got right (at least old reddit) and also on a context of more online/faster interactions as opposed to Slashdot that brought some of the old forums structure and on a context of slower and more meaningful (ahem, for the most part) interactions. Hence why moderation was more precise, upvotes had color and you still had things like user signatures
In a way, users and posts on HN are "cattle", not pets ;)
Here's the original essay -- https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
This is a good little overview entitled "Worse is Better Considered Harmful" -- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-... -- in which the authors argue for "Growable Is Better".
In summary - it's about ease of implementation trumping all else. C and Unix are memorably labelled "the ultimate computer viruses".
As opposed to tearing through a thread and downvoting any and everything you disagree with.
Slashdot encouraged more positive moderation, unless you were obviously trolling.
The meta-moderators kept any moderation abuse in check.
It's sad to see we have devolved from this model, and conversations have become far more toxic and polarized as a direct result of it. (Dissenting opinions are quickly hidden, and those that reinforce existing norms bubble to the top.)
I believe HN papers over these problems by relying on a lot of manual hand-moderation and curation which sounds very labor intensive, whereas Slashdot was deliberately hands-off and left the power to the people.
Slashdot is struggling a bit these days. The lower the comment count, the worse the moderation, so it's a bit of a snowball effect. The UI could use some help; there are many who don't want it to change at all, but it would be nice if an alternate UI were available, hitting the same API.
I think HN leans towards deriding both MS and Musk (see any thread on MS and FOSS). In any case, I think that part of being well-spoken is that you speak out against severely bad actors often. It's never useful to reflexively criticize something, but people may contemplate and still decide they're right. Making a comment is the bare minimum of accountability for bad actors who should know better. It may not be to your taste that HN is such a platform, but that's not up to your decision any more than it is mine. There are many problems from a society that struggles to speak well or ill as a subject deserves, which is to say to speak the truth when it should be spoken, and not to speak mistruths except in exceptional circumstances. It would surely be best if one reasoned critique solved the problem and we never would hear of it again, but alas.
I don't expect HN commenters to change their minds necessarily, but I do wish they would elevate posts with more consideration and objectivity, and less low-effort outrage.
I don't really see it. /. had this basically every single thread and the criticism was very not substantive. Musk is unpopular here, but the criticism at least has a bit more meat to it and is not on every single post.
On HN Meta is one step away from going bankrupt and being sued into oblivion. Meta’s Earnings Reports tell a very different story.
I feel like HN fits the same shape in tech as Slashdot did and I’m not happy about it.
unsure why precisely it descended so much
not crazy about HN's approach but the quality of the discourse here is so high through whatever mechanism, I don't much care
I'd expect Slashdot's point systems and meta moderation to make a comeback in the LLM slop world we live in currently, but nobody knows about it anymore. Steam kinda rediscovered it in their reviews, perhaps even was inspired by it (I hope...)
All of this to say that one feature brings in a whole set of additional complications. Less is more.
I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense. It’s primarily user-driven, aside from obvious abusive behavior. The downvote and flagging mechanisms do the heavy lifting.
The heuristics that detect a high ratio of arguments to upvotes (as far as I can tell) can be frustrating at times, but they also do a good job of driving ragebait off the front page quickly.
The moderators are also very good at rescuing overlooked stories and putting them in the second chance pool for users to consider again, which feels infinitely better than moderators forcing things to the front page.
It also seems that some times moderators will undo some of the actions that push a story off the front page if it’s relevant. I’ve seen flagged stories come back from the dead or flame war comment sections get a section chance at the front page with a moderator note at the top.
Back in the Slashdot days I remember people rotating through multiple accounts for no reason other than to increase their chances of having one of them with randomly granted moderation points so they could use them as weapons in arguments. Felt like a different era.
It seems to be a combination of manual and automated moderation (mostly by dang but he has more help now), using the kind of over/under-engineered custom tools you'd expect from technophiles. I've wondered a lot about the kind of programming logic he and the others coded up that make HN as curious as it is, and I have half a mind to make a little forum (yet another HN clone, but not really) purely for the sake of trying to implement how I think their moderation probably works. If I went through with this, I'd have it solely be for Show HN style project sharing/discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671 for those who missed it
* For every N=round(10) years software experience, you can click submit N10 times.
* You must* provide a link and year proving your earliest project or employoment.
* Max 256 submissions per day for everyone total.
Should be a fun experiment. Email me if you want an early invite.
To be spartan is to philosophize.
φιλοσοφείν often remains as an infinitive because it's describing an activity someone does or wants to do (to philosophize)
- Every Venture Capitalist Ever.