# Hacker News Hacker News is a social news site run by Y Combinator, focused on computer science, startups, and anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. It lives at https://news.ycombinator.com. **To this day, it remains my number one source of information about tech innovation.** Not a newsletter, not an algorithmic feed, not a social network. A single page of links, ranked by people who actually build things. ## Why it still works The design has barely changed since 2007, and that's a feature. No images, no infinite scroll, no engagement optimization, no ads dressed up as posts. Text links and a comment thread. The interface refuses to compete for your attention, which leaves you free to actually read. What keeps me coming back: - **The comments are frequently better than the article.** The person who wrote the library, ran the company, or worked on the exact system being discussed shows up in the thread. That happens often enough to be the main draw - **Signal density.** A day's front page covers more genuinely new technical work than a month of most feeds - **Correction pressure.** Bad claims get challenged fast, with specifics. It's not always polite, but it is usually substantive - **No algorithm modelling me.** Everyone sees roughly the same front page. I get exposed to things I would never have searched for, which is exactly what a discovery source is for That last point matters more than it sounds. Most of my sources tell me more about what I already read. Hacker News tells me what a few thousand curious builders found interesting today. Those are very different inputs, and only one of them breaks you out of your own [[Information Silos|silos]]. ## How I use it - Skim the front page, open interesting things in tabs - Read the comments first on anything where I lack context. The thread tells me whether the article is worth the time - Anything worth keeping goes to [[Readwise]] for later processing, then into the vault as a permanent note - The HN discussion URL goes in the note's References alongside the source. The thread is often the more valuable half Several notes in this vault started as an HN link. That's the pipeline working. ## Where to be careful No source is neutral, and this one has a shape: - Strong bias toward the tastes of its audience: systems programming, startups, privacy, self-hosting, skepticism about big companies - Confident wrong answers are common. Someone stating something flatly in a comment is not evidence. I got caught by exactly this while writing [[Qwen Image 3.0]], where a highly-upvoted claim about released model weights turned out to be false - Contrarianism as a reflex. Any popular thing gets torn down, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes as sport - It can eat an entire morning if you let it Treat it as a lead generator, not a fact source. The links are the value. Verify before you write anything down. ## References - https://news.ycombinator.com - Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - Search across all posts: https://hn.algolia.com ## Related - [[Readwise]] - [[Information Silos]] - [[Where to promote projects]] - [[Simon Willison]]