Reading up on Hacker News
74 deep · digging since nov 18, 25
- How much of HN is AI?
The article finds that AI-related stories constitute about 12% of Hacker News front-page submissions over the past month in recent weeks.
- Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
On Hacker News, users are invited to name simple, everyday tasks where large language models repeatedly struggle or give incorrect answers.
- Queryable Executables
The article explains a technique to compile programs so they can answer queries about their own execution without re-running, using static analysis or embedded metadata.
- Assembly Hall of Shame
The article discusses a compilation of embarrassing or flawed assembly language examples highlighted in a Hacker News post titled 'Assembly Hall of Shame'.
- “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
The piece argues that claiming 'code was never the hard part' belittles programmers by ignoring the real challenges they face in software development.
- Hacker Public Radio
This article appears to be a title or header referencing 'Hacker Public Radio | Hacker News', likely indicating a link or aggregation point between the two platforms.
- Stolen Buttons | Anatoly Zenkov
Anatoly Zenkov shares his collection of stolen website buttons, showcasing diverse designs and prompting HN discussion on standards, aesthetics, and automation.
- Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
The author created a userscript that automatically opens Hacker News links in the current tab, eliminating the need to open two tabs per link.
- Our position on open-weights models
Hacker News announces its stance favoring open-weights AI models, arguing they promote transparency, innovation, and community scrutiny while addressing potential misuse concerns.
- You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly
The article argues that effective engineers rely on slow, clear thinking and systematic invariant‑based analysis rather than fleeting flashes of insight to solve hard problems.
- Show HN: HN Hall of Fame – browse 3,100 legendary Hacker News links
The HN Hall of Fame site lets users browse a curated collection of 3,100 legendary Hacker News links, showcasing the community's most impactful posts.
- Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works
The post showcases a curated list of opening lines from renowned literary works, offering readers a glimpse into the iconic beginnings of celebrated novels and stories.
- Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
An Ask HN thread invites users to share their current projects and work-in-progress as of July 2026, encouraging brief descriptions, links, and updates on personal or professional endeavors.
- Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?
The Ask HN post questions whether software has become universally buggier, seeking community observations on declining code quality in recent years.
- Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
A Hacker News community member suggests adding visible flags to identify AI-written articles, requesting discussion on practical implementation, user experience impact, and community guidelines for AI content labeling.
- Collection of Digital Clock Designs
The Hacker News post presents a community‑curated gallery of digital clock designs, linking to various projects, screenshots, and source code for enthusiasts to explore and reuse.
- Bring back crappy forums
Chronological forums better support long-term focused discussions and revisiting, while tree-view systems like HN/Reddit excel at surfacing diverse voices in short-lived threads.
- Stealing Is a Skill
The blog post argues that outright copying another company's website design pixel-by-pixel for commercial gain is disrespectful and lacks the learning and transformation that define creative "stealing."
- Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Hacker Trends indexes 18 years of Hacker News comments to let users compare term frequency over time, built on Upstash Redis Search.
- Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
A report shows reading for pleasure among schoolkids has sharply declined since 2012, with commenters blaming smartphones, classroom technology, and parental habits.
- I design with Claude more than Figma now
Hacker News commenters debate whether AI-generated prototypes pressure teams into shipping incomplete code, polarizing between productivity gains and production risks.
- Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
Hacker News users list personal AI-powered tools they built, including custom chatbots, automated workflows, and coding assistants, highlighting productivity gains and limitations.
- Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
A Hacker News user asks why the community seems anti-AI, arguing that code quality matters less than shipping speed and user satisfaction.
- Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
A Hacker News discussion argues that social media feeds, including HN, have shifted from connecting friends to delivering addictive content and fads.
- A website that lists websites to submit your website to
Hacker News commenters discuss a website listing 50 directories for submitting websites, debating the declining SEO value and risk of spam.
- You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
The piece argues that many modern professionals mislabel a lack of meaning and purpose as burnout, calling it 'existential starvation' instead.
- The Art of Money Getting
Hacker News commenters debate whether P.T. Barnum's 1880 self-help advice on choosing the right work and being honest still applies to modern wealth-building, with some arguing today's richest succeed by exploiting debt and political power instead.
- Ferrari Luce | Hacker News
Ferrari unveils the Luce, its first electric vehicle, featuring four-wheel steering, active suspension, and a sound system that amplifies real axle vibrations for driver feedback.
- Hacker News front page as a site
A site that displays Hacker News front page stories in a newspaper-like grid layout with AI-generated summaries, gaining attention and discussion on HN itself.
- Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
Software engineering is shifting from writing code to understanding problems and architecting solutions, a change many developers and business owners fail to grasp.
- What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
Cognitive debt describes the hidden cost of AI-generated code that developers don't fully understand, compounding with scale and threatening long-term maintainability.
- I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
The author documents building a Game Boy emulator in F#, highlighting how the language's functional features simplified emulation logic and state management.
- Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
A senior engineer's drunken list of candid career advice criticizes interview processes, praises dynamic languages, and emphasizes documentation and financial planning.
- Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
A Hacker News discussion argues that efforts to engineer better communication systems often ignore the core problem: people do not genuinely listen or translate across knowledge gaps.
- The Importance of Being Idle
A Hacker News discussion reflects on the cultural and philosophical value of idleness, drawing on essays by Lafargue, Russell, and others, with commenters debating its feasibility under capitalism and modern productivity pressure.
- Ask HN: Most beautiful personal blog UI you have ever seen?
Hacker News users share and debate favorite personal blog UIs, from minimal typography to animated interactive designs.
- Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
Hacker News updated its guidelines to prohibit posting AI-generated or AI-edited comments, aiming to preserve human conversation.
- Meta acquires Moltbook
Meta acquires Moltbook, the AI agent social network, bringing its co-founders into its Meta Superintelligence Labs.
- Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting
A user suggests restricting new accounts from posting on Hacker News to combat increasing AI-generated content and spam.
- AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
AI coding tools have shifted the engineer's role from writing code to supervising AI output, making the job harder by removing the craft and automation requires engineers to take on higher-level responsibilities.
- New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
New accounts on Hacker News are significantly more likely to use em-dashes, suggesting bot or AI-generated content is on the rise.
- AI makes you boring
Hacker News commenters debate whether AI use produces boring, generic work, with some blaming the tool and others the users' lack of depth.
- Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
Hacker News commenters argue that Show HN submissions are increasingly AI-generated, diluting quality and making it harder for human-crafted projects to gain visibility.
- Breaking the spell of vibe coding
The Hacker News discussion pushes back on the idea that AI coding and deep skill development are mutually exclusive, arguing engineers can grow in both areas simultaneously.
- Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'
Vercel's CEO offered to pay Jmail's $46k hosting bill after it went viral hosting Epstein files, sparking debate over the platform's pricing versus cheaper alternatives.
- Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
Hacker News commenters celebrate the enduring legacy and technical depth of the late Sheldon Brown's bicycle repair website.
- How to effectively write quality code with AI
AI code quality depends on small, verifiable steps, strict linting, and treating AI as an amplifier for skilled engineers rather than a replacement for architectural thinking.
- Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”
Turso rewrites SQLite in Rust to enable a new database engine compatible with SQLite's file format while addressing C's memory safety issues and adding support for concurrent writes.
- Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year
Show HN posts have increased 125% year-over-year, now making up 15% of all HN submissions.
- Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?
HN users share RSS subscriptions to reduce doomscrolling, favoring tech blogs, webcomics, and substacks over algorithmic feeds.
- How I estimate work
Software estimates are political negotiations where engineers should treat them as time ranges that match management expectations, not accuracy exercises.
- Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale
Steve Yegge's Gas Town project pushes vibecoding to extremes, generating 225K+ lines of code without human review, sparking intense debate on Hacker News.
- Show HN: Rails UI
Rails UI offers a subscription-based design system of consistent, pre-built screens and components for Rails apps, aiming to bridge the gap AI can't fix.
- Just Get a Better Job
Finding a new job is a high-stakes, risky investment—not a simple swap—because of benefits, timing, and personal circumstances.
- To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
HN commenters argue AI can reduce tech writing headcount but cannot replace the best writers who act as UX advocates, bug finders, and empathetic communicators.
- No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams
Early-stage engineering teams often fail when they adopt corporate rituals like rigid standups and recurring 1:1s, which demotivate engineers and slow progress.
- Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
Hacker News users share their current side projects and new ideas in the monthly 'Ask HN' thread.
- Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Stack Overflow's monthly question count has fallen sharply, with commenters attributing the decline both to LLMs and to the site's long-standing toxic moderation culture.
- 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
A study finds that 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and those negative posts tend to receive more points and comments than positive ones.
- Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
In a 2025 Ask HN thread, developers share that low-effort tech jobs exist in government, defense, and internal tools, though many warn such roles are soul-crushing and suggest addressing deeper unhappiness instead.
- The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025
Simon Willison ranked as the most popular blogger on Hacker News for the third consecutive year in 2025, based on analysis of domain score data.
- Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite
A tool serves 22 GB of Hacker News history via SQLite compiled to WASM, fetching only needed database shards in the browser.
- Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
A user asks how Hacker News works, and the community explains it is a curiosity-driven forum that resists gaming and promotion.
- Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Hacker News users share their side projects that generate roughly $500 or more per month in 2025, from AI tools and Etsy shops to software and books.
- Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video]
Kilauea's 38th eruptive episode destroyed a USGS webcam, capturing lava fountains and debris until signal loss.
- Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
The HN commenters largely argue that the author's 'transparent leadership' is just a rebranding of true servant leadership, which already includes teaching and empowerment.
- Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?
The Economist article questions whether the US jobs market is near a sharp downturn, noting stock-market and AI investment buoy growth while ordinary workers struggle.
- 100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
SQLite achieves over 100k transactions per second on a billion-row dataset by avoiding network overhead, though durability and HA remain trade-offs.
- All it takes is for one to work out
A Hacker News thread debates whether the motivational maxim "all it takes is for one to work out" is genuinely helpful or merely feel-good advice that ignores systemic luck and privilege.
- How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity
A Hacker News discussion critiques the article's centrist framing, arguing that social media polarization stems from platform scale, manufactured consent, and vocabulary misalignment rather than individual insanity.
- Hacker News
Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship, run by the investment firm Y Combinator.
Takes
Introducing gcombinator. change 'y' to 'g' to get full context of the article + comments! Working on something epic pic.twitter.com/wWHLnMn3DU
@janwilmake
Quick new post: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsightI took all the 930 frontpage Hacker News article+discussion of December 2015 and asked the GPT 5.1 Thinking API to do an in-hindsight analysis to identify the most/least prescient comments. This took… pic.twitter.com/Ufexq5xmDX
@karpathy
Hacker News can always be counted on for some solid virtue theater. It produces more of Aesop's sour grapes than any other wantrepreneur space. So many aggrieved techies with a need to rationalize why they haven't made it to the moon and why other, lesser, fools have. SAD! pic.twitter.com/al3fOA0hEg
@dhh