Ask HN: What types of posts do you most enjoy on Hacker News? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What types of posts do you most enjoy on Hacker News?

5 pointsFerkiHN7 comments

I've been spending a lot of time on HN lately and I’m always fascinated by the range of content here — from deep technical writeups and startup war stories to lightweight tools, philosophical questions, and debugging-at-3am humor.

So I wanted to ask the community:

What kinds of posts do you personally enjoy the most on HN? Do you come here mainly for Show HNs, Ask HNs, in-depth articles, founder stories, tutorials, weird edge cases, or something else?

Are there specific themes, types of tools, or even authors that always catch your attention?

I’m not asking to “game the system” — just genuinely curious what people love seeing here.

Thanks! — FerkiHN

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For me personally, I love those posts where someone shares a small tool they built, especially if it’s written in C, Rust, or even Bash. There’s something inspiring about seeing a minimal, self-contained project that solves a real problem in a clever way.

Also really enjoy “Ask HN” posts where people ask things like “What do you wish more devs knew?” or “What’s something underrated in software engineering?”

Curious to read everyone else’s favorites!

I stay for the links to tutorials, the science links, and the intermediate level compsci articles. There's other places to get science links, but HN hits a couple of my interests narrowly. It's hard to find intermediate level compsci articles. There's an impenetrable jungle of really terrible "basic" articles, and a few inscrutable hard articles, hard to find those in the middle.

I'm not asking for the recipe on concentrated dark matter, this is just a casual conversation! But, by any chance, would you be willing to share the recipe on concentrated dark matter?

Sure!

I like posts that have hard honest work behind them.

Innovative web stuff and things that share actual mastery, actual experience. The kind of stuff we only know after struggling against a challenge for long enough.

Posts about how people are using LLMs. Posts about the nuances of specific tech stacks. Posts about interesting edge cases.

My favorite are accessible hobby posts with well written tutorials. I also enjoy the philosophical posts.

Gizmo tinkering, personal engineering projects of all kinds, bug hunt recounts and some scientific stuff. Also lighter fluff of all kinds.

Just yesterday I compiled a gigantic ublock filter for HN that hides political posts, everything related to artificial intelligence, "founder culture" as you call it, tech business stuff, legal matters, everything webdev related, certain topics that young tech bros seem to be obsessed with (psychedelics, self improvement, note taking apps, hanki panki or whatever etc) and posts about scientific topics that tend to attract habitual incorrectorrists.

So far it has worked wonders and made HN pleasant to browse again.

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