Sixteen years here, and the half-life decay of this community has been slower than anywhere else. That takes real, consistent work, and we have been lucky to have it. Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.
The grit, curiosity, and people building things have always been inspiring.
Ten years for me! Came because my partner sent me an interesting thread, stayed because of the interesting articles and thoughtful comments from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Thanks HN! I regularly open HN during lectures. There is no better way to show my students what software engineering entails and why I focus on certain topics.
Is SCRUM really as great as its evangelists claim? Let's read HN comments.
What are good use cases for UML? Let's check out HN.
Does anyone actually care about CoCoMo or CMMI? Let's read ... oh - nearly nobody's talking about it there. Maybe it won't be that relevant to the students.
- In a nutshell: everyone should know about UML and how some relevant diagram types look. Nobody should use it religiously.
- Diagrams are great tools for communicating ideas and implementations on an abstract level, and for interactively thinking about ideas that can be drawn in some way. A diagram can also visually highlight problem areas (e.g., components with many dependencies).
- Good use cases for diagrams in SE are e.g., explaining high-level architecture to someone, thinking about and refining database schemas, documenting interaction flows, or giving an overview of class structure in automatically generated code documentation
- It is nice to have visual consistency - it makes parsing a diagram so much faster and less error-prone. UML provides sensible guidelines or inspiration on how to draw e.g., a sequence diagram or a class diagram. There is no need to re-invent the wheel.
- In most cases, knowing about the diagram types and their approximate design is enough. As probably very few people know what the different styles of arrows or boxes might mean, it is a good idea to annotate important elements with their meaning.
- For thinking/communication, drawing diagrams by hand is the best way. Excalidraw/tldraw are nice for stuff that should go into static documents.
- Documenting the state of a system with manually generated diagrams is tedious and requires constant updates. A better way is to auto-generate e.g., class diagrams using PlantUML or Mermaid.
- Nobody uses UML for designing complex systems and then auto-generating code.
The startup I work for is pretty flat. There's the chief product officer who is actually pretty technical, the chief technical officer, and engineers basically.
We use UMLs and flow charts in miro to diagram things from both a high level (for product to understand) to intricate details.
(but seriously, I'm interested it's just everything I've seen before had the strong scent of "we're doing this nonsense because we believe we're supposed to but don't understand why")
It's useful to have a common language for diagrams (actors, storage, etc)
It's not useful for more than very abstract concepts though. If you're UMLing your entire Java app before you add another class/method/function, you're doing it wrong.
Yeah we don't go that overkill, we really just diagram surface area (how does the backend communicate with the frontend and through which apis and when, and when should the front end expect a socket message, etc)
As a method of communication between projects, it works wonderfully
Fortunately I've never worked for an org that did "stuff" for the sake of doing stuff, or at least I never lasted long with those orgs. In order to be lean and efficient we need to cut out all the stuff that doesn't serve the purpose of building product.
I've personally found sequence diagrams to be immensely valuable the handful of times I've worked with them. Both for documenting the intended way to use an API and for analyzing the ways the different components of a system can interact. This has often helped me escape my tendency to focus on the happy path when analyzing systems.
Having architecture diagrams is not fundamentally a bad thing, and standardizing the conventions for them is not fundamentally a bad thing. I think the thing that gave UML a terribly bad name was the cavalcade of early "zero code" or "low code" tools trying to turn your UML diagram into code; those were terrible.
Drawing things on whiteboards to see the architecture, absolutely.
The more formalism it has and the more it was insisted on was always a strong signal that was was happening was a middle management cargo cult and not actually useful work.
I believe that there exist organizations that derived value from this sort of thing, I just haven't seen them.
Almost 12 years of HN. I'm still a lurker, I'm sorry I don't contribute more, but I don't have much time and reading HN with a coffee in the morning is the best thing I can do. Thx everyone involved <3
Better than contribution, consider visiting /newest and upvote|flag things there. There're a lot of good articles lost in the haystack. Even if it's once in a while it's very good for the community.
In the old days of reddit, when it was almost lost as a community, that was called the Knights of New. A selfless system sadly ignored/killed by reddit admins and mods.
You need not be sorry for not contributing. Thanks for being here. HN is a place for learners and people who improve their lives by knowledge and building awesome user-centric products can make world a better place for others as well!
You don’t have to contribute something significant. I don’t think it’s about how much one contributes, or now important it is. If you have an opinion - give it. If you have a question - ask it. If you have a criticism - tell it (respectfully). I often get the most out of HN when I’m asking questions. The best part about this place is that people answer them. Or gives you the background context that wasn’t in an article.
cheers to all you glorious bastards. i disagree with you on most things and quibble over pettiest crap, but know it is all in good fun. we are prolly in the weirdest point in computer history and get to see it make it through ( or not.. either is fine ). its a secret, but those annual affirtation are one of my favorite traditions.
I’m thankful for this place and this sentiment. As a young programmer I never imagined having this erudite enclave, capable of maintaining a level head during difficult days. Here’s to having community…and I agree with about half of what y’all say, because I’m aggressively anchored at the average. :)
Been here 18 years. Almost never comment, but I come back everyday for the insightful comments. Thank you @dang for the great moderation and thank you to great HN community.
Happy Thanksgiving! This is the only site that passes my threshold for signal-to-noise ratio. I genuinely learn from discussions here. It humbles me to be on the same webpage as some of the most knowledgeable, ambitious, thoughtful folks across the globe. Thanks everyone for your active participation.
I've had an HN account for 17 years now. This is one of the last good places left on the web for intelligent conversation, and pretty much the last place I even want to post comments anymore honestly. Thank you @dang for the hard work on maintaining that. Hopefully this site can continue to be a bastion in an increasingly dismal social media environment.
I'm hoping I'm only at the halfway point in my life. So many cool and interesting things have developed in my existence, and there are so many more cool and interesting things to come! Looking forward as I have for the last 17 years to reading about them on HN as they happen.
Not sure what I would tell my young self back in the 90s first. Self driving cars, LLMs that can fix bugs I've been trying to fix for 12 years. Maybe I would start with "Linux distros where you don't have to manually compile 15 random dependencies to run a single piece of software".
Happy Thanksgiving and I hope you had (or are having) a good day. Or if it wasn’t good—stressful, tiring, etc.—here’s to hoping for some great sleep.
I don’t remember kids being out of school for so long around Thanksgiving when I was younger. All I can hope for is eight hours of sleep after a full week of childcare. I guess I’m most thankful for teachers and schools being open.
6 years with you, guys! I don't usually write here (english it's not my forte), but I wanted to do it to tell you how important and cozy this place feels to me in 2025. It's like finding a bonfire in a Souls game, where the rest of the internet feels like it's been taken by an evil force.
Holy cow... I signed up to HN 18 years ago. I am more of a behind-the-scenes guy in the tech world so I don't know most of you but I've enjoyed participating in this community over the years.
I hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving; here's to the next 18 years! :)
Happy thanksgiving all. In an era where algorithms on other platforms seem optimized for outrage and engagement bait, I'm grateful for HN's optimization for curiosity. It's one of the few places left where I can open a thread on a topic I disagree with and actually expect to have my mind changes -- or at least understand the opposing view better -- by the top comment.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.
I'm new here and lurked for a year or so before posting.
This is the only site I visit multiple times a day. It's kind of addictive.
To me, it's such a unique place with so many intelligent minds and great conversations. I wish I'd have found this place years ago.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone -- I've mostly been a lurker here over the last 20 years and I'm thankful for being able to interact with such a bright and vibrant community full of thinkers, doers and explorers -- you guys definitely changed my life for the better and inspired me in many, many ways.
Been lurking since 2011 or so. Dare I say that the average level of discourse has finally fallen to a level where I feel comfortable participating after over ten years of just reading.
That being said HN was and continues to be one of the most valuable resources for geeks on the net.
I'm here just under two years (I was browsing before creating an account) and I'm immensely grateful to have this in my life. HN is a tiny corner of the internet where I can consistently find high quality stories and learn something new every day. Not only that, I also get to interact with brilliant people and have meaningful conversations, unlike so many other internet forums that are just full of hate.
Thanks to the moderators, commenters and the whole community for building and maintaining this space of the internet and adding some value to my day!
Seems weird to say, but I've been posting here for seventeen years now. And in that time, can I say that the quality of the discourse has slipped some? Well... if I'm being honest, probably yeah. A little. But at the same time, I can still honestly say that HN is still easily the best community of this sort on the 'net, at least that I'm aware of. OK, Lobste.rs has some merit, but the problem there is that the community there is arguably still a little too small, and you just don't get the variety and volume of interesting discussion you get here. But the level of discourse is high there as well.
Anyway, I find HN to be a wonderful refuge from a lot of the absurdity that's "out there" and I will happily throw in my own "Thanks, guys!" to dang and tomhow. And to pg for starting this whole thing back in the day.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and here's to more years to come!
Eighteen years here. I am not American but I think this is a holiday that we can all celebrate as reminder that we should be grateful for what and specially for who we have, independently what we don't have.
Happy Thanksgiving! I have been here at least for the last 12 years. I open the website at least twice a day - once in the morning when starting work, and once late evening before logging out for the day. The mantra I follow is that if something doesn't trend on HN it's not worth paying attention to.
Initially, I would only click on the links and jump off HN but over the last few years I have been more interested in the comments and the discussion.
Thank you everyone one for such a great community!
I don't "do" Thanksgiving (I'm not a USian), but I have family that do, so hope that yesterday and the short break for all was good for those who enjoyed it.
I've been here 13 years and almost 3 months, meaning I'm averaging ~44 karma a month, and it's one of the few gotos I don't consider harmful.
I think most of us here would see the damage that's happened to so many communities - all of them with their eternal Septembers - and I thought the last one that would hold out because I could curate what I saw would be reddit, but no, that's gone the way of so many before it for me.
HN is an experiment in a niche community with its own broad definition of "whatever is interesting", its own values and its own quirks. It's large enough to be vibrant and diverse, but small enough to have an uncodified but recognisable culture.
If there's one change I'm going to make in the next year though, it's relating to myself. I want most of my karma next year to come from my own Show HN posts: I want to build things and share those things, not just jump in on comment threads. Let's see how that goes.
Happy holidays to all, and may the Winter to be kind to you and yours.
Happy Thanksgiving! I’ve been reading HN for a while but only recently started participating. It’s rare to find a corner of the internet that has maintained this level of thoughtful discourse for so long. Huge thanks to the mods for their hard work.
Happy Thanksgiving! ... I just wanted to express my gratitude to the Commodore 64 personal computer I received as a Christmas gift in 1982 (or maybe '83?). I didn't know it then but it set the course for the remainder of my life. I just wanted another device to play video games (Atari 2600 was over), but once I discovered "programming", playing video games turned into tweaking, cracking and even creating video games. I was in 6th grade; I used to stay awake until the dawn, even on school nights, programming and trading games (300 baud modem on a single phone line). My grades dropped, but thankfully my Mom didn't care; she knew what I was doing and how much I was learning. Honestly, many of the basic concepts I use today I taught myself when was I was 12 years old on the Commodore 64. So, thank you, Commodore. You're 64KB computer impacted my life more than, probably, anything else in my life.
I've lurked even longer than I've been a user... Probably about 15 years. It's been fun to watch several generations of kindred spirits join the party. For the most part, I think they assimilate, so the spirit of HN remains strong while new perspectives are added to the mix. It's still one of the best communities around.
Happy Thanksgiving @dang, @tomhow, and the HN community! Almost 17 years here, and it's hard to overstate how much I learned from y'all.
Through tech cycles, heated debates, and some inevitable fads, the limitless curiosity of this community remains inspiring. Thank you mods and YC for staying true to the original hacker ethos.
Almost 4 years here.
Thank you all!
Thanks to the creators of the site.
Thanks to the ones that maintain the site.
Thanks to the ones that moderate the conversations (that do an amazing job).
And special thanks to all those that have the fire of truth and curiosity that keep alive this great community!
I haven't been participating as much lately because life got in the way but I'm still thankful this community exists, it remains one of the very few places I can have high level discussions with fellow inquiring minds.
I’ve been a long time lurker (7 years now I think) and finally made an acccount. Thanks HN. You bring joy and enthusiasm to this hectic World Wide Web we all share. The distributed asynchronous town square I never asked for! <3
Huge thanks to the mods and YC for creating this space. HN is legendary in its own time. Hoping @prodigycorp and the result of us can enjoy another 15 years of thoughtful hackish conversation and news.
I've only been participating for a few months (lurking for much longer) and I've got to say HN has been the best news aggregation experience I've ever had. I hope to be here for many years to come!
HN has been a kaleidoscope of the human psyche. idlewords dissing pg, Michael o' church's rants, Terry's slow break into insanity, etc. I'm thankful above all that this place still exists.
Happy Thanksgiving! I've been here just five years, but it's my main source for discovering interesting things in this world. Thanks to everyone who makes positive contributions here.
Lurking, occasionally commenting, rarely posting. I've read HN everyday since I started working in the industry since March 2016. I appreciate what HN is and the shared culture.
Thankful for the overall balance this site still manages to find between diversity of viewpoint and civility. It gets spicy sometimes, but I like it that way.
Hope everyone's year finishes better than it started.
This thread, in and of itself, demonstrates the incredible quality of this community. Thank you to all of you, and especially to @dang and @tomhow for thanklessly holding us all together.
17 years here (wow). I don’t post much but I get a lot out of this site and it’s one of my few daily reads. Grateful for the site, its mods, and the contributors.
18 years. The site has become a hotbed of political discussion recently, and I do wish the manual unflagging was stopped, but other people are right when they say that Startup News/Hacker News has remained relevant for far longer than other sites that started around the same time. The only one I can think of that stayed relevant for that long is Ars Technica.
But ARS is not what it used to be. Sadly. The content is still decent, but not the forum so much. My arrival at HN nearly 8 years ago was about when I wasn’t seeing community there anymore.
I can't believe I've been around these parts for 17 years... Thank you for the inspiration to take a look at my join date. I feel the same as you about the discussions here, there is always a level of depth (and silliness) that I appreciate about the banter and interactions here.
Why does't HN respect requests to delete accounts? That doesn't seem so nice as a community. I know they give an excuse, but... I have to admit though I did find a job on here once so it is somewhat useful, but I'm not Stockholm Syndrome-ish about it
HN has been a wonderful source of both news and community - it connected me to my industry in ways that could only have been achieved otherwise by moving to SF or NYC.
In a way, it feels like a great continuation of my Slashdot years.
10 years here! I don't remember how I found out about HN, but I've been reading this since A-levels. I didn't understand much back then, and was just browsing around.
10 years past, and now working as a software engineer, at least I understand a bit more.
I think it is safe for me say that HN has had a very large role in moulding my personality. A left-leaning atheist who loves computing and is often at odds with the current zeitgeist in India, I find my true home behind a computer screen.. Slashdot was my original initiation, and I moved to Hacker News rather late after a successful YC application. Not much of a contributor, but everyday starts with at least half an hour spent reading the comments here (who RTFAs anyway huh?).
Thank you all. Without you, life would've been much simpler, but not better!
15 years also for me, mostly lurking from a remote location in France, reading some discussions every single day and continuously learning new things. This community had so much impact on my professional life as a full stack software engineer!
I discovered the world around Ruby on Rails, then the modern JavaScript ecosystem (and CoffeeScript followed later by TypeScript), burned out, focused on Ruby, added Rust to my toolbox, wrote a small hobby operating system that had to have its own Lisp dialect of course. I was inspired to create so many side projects over the years, most of them open source, thanks to the influence of this community.
I also tried my hands at starting a startup obviously, multiple times, but I'm a solo dev and didn't succeed at finding a profitable niche for myself, instead I applied my knowledge to better understand the business and product sides of the startups I've been working for which made me a better engineer for sure.
This community almost made me move to the Silicon Valley, but instead I traveled the world as a digital nomad when everyone was doing it, and came back home to settle down in a forest close to my roots.
Reading you all daily I can imagine what could have been my life at the heart of the tech world, and at the same time I'm happy to read its pulse from afar.
I hope HN will still be here in 15 more years, thanks everyone!
Just wanted to say, I enjoyed reading about your story, wishing you well from all the way in California. This place is pretty great that it brings so many of us together from different backgrounds but share a love for tech, learning, and more.
Happy Thanksgiving fellas, proud to be part of this secret community comprised of only the cream of society's elite crop making even the pioneers among the early freemasons look puny in juxtaposition. Cheers!
Definitely grateful to have this site and appreciative of the people that make it what it is. I check in multiple times a day and always find something new (or at least new to me), interesting and frequently useful!
I left a large software corp last year to co-found a startup, launching myself in the world of OSS. I couldn't be more grateful to the HN community for introducing me to great concepts and tools!
I often get more excited about the commentary and what I’ll learn from interesting experts in the HN comments than the original link itself. Thanks to all who contribute their thoughts here.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, thankful for this community - it’s one of the few places left on the internet I can visit each day and learn something genuinely interesting or useful.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Checking in here almost daily is always a bright spot. Keep up the good work @dang and thanks for making this a place we want to be.
Hey, community! Thank you for this opportunity to connect and feel closeness to the best parts and people in our industry.
Thank you for your open mindedness, smarts, stupid fun and lovable nerdiness.
I feel at home here.
One thing that makes me sad are dystopian fears. Not sure if this is warranted or not, but certainly get my dose of dread from HN. But thank you for being so sensitive and caring in this.
I still get value. But there's too much noise I think. I also think I'm older now and I'm more adverse to "done it, seen it"
The odd "made an app to do basic thing xyz" doesn't get my attention anymore.
Also, posts related to science get a hard scrutiny. Most posts are just cross references to poorly moderated subreddits. That, or they're just posts directly from archx with no external paper references. I'm not a scientist, but I know enough to know when to ignore bullshit.
Most posts to HN are still mostly bullshit. But I know enough to occasionally see something interesting. That's may be 4 times a year at this point.
...
I also want to add more context. I've been in the Anathem ideology for about 20 years now. It has shaped my world view. Call me fra geuis.
If you want to present what you think are new ideas, be prepared to back them up. When we get the Loreites up and running, I'll refer you to them.
I feel compelled to point out that your account is almost 5 years old (although it could be an alt), and it has several previous comments associated with it, including some in 2023.
I’ve been more of a lurker than a poster over the years, but this place has shaped how I think about tech, work, and the future more than any other corner of the internet.
Huge thanks to @dang, @tomhow, YC, and everyone who shows up here with curiosity and good faith. The signal-to-noise ratio here is still unmatched.
Here’s to many more years of weird, smart, opinionated conversations.
The interesting thing is why this (false) accusation appears now, years later. I don't recall people saying it at the time, which makes sense because it was obviously untrue.
You removed it from the directory. Not very honest, is it?
Also, how is criticizing Aaron Swartz off topic? The other commenter brought it up. No one made him commit suicide but HN has a boner for this guy like he's a victim.
The YC directory is a YC feature, not an HN one. I'm pretty certain HN mods (dang, tomhow) have no direct influence over that, though they might care how inclusion/exclusion of investment embarrassments reflects on HN itself.
HN itself clearly hasn't shied away from critical coverage of that venture.
Your other argument shows a distinct lack of empathy and a certain disregard for facts of the matter.
I think anyone can be a hacker. Anyone can break any laws. But to kill yourself over it? It's in the extreme. I don't believe law enforcement has to take the blame for that.
The only reference to Swartz that I see in the parent comment is:
> Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.
And the rest was just upbeat talk in general.
Unless the parent comment was edited, I don't understand why you responded:
> What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
By "here", I assume you mean "HN in general", but your comment comes off as loaded (e.g., "did to himself" sounds like a conscious attempt at asserting a framing), and the timing seems poor (i.e., that particular innocuous comment, on this particular day).
Take heart: there are a lot of people like Aaron Swartz. Of course you'll find them in proportionally fewer numbers, when you look somewhere that attracts with money/power.
Sixteen years here, and the half-life decay of this community has been slower than anywhere else. That takes real, consistent work, and we have been lucky to have it. Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.
The grit, curiosity, and people building things have always been inspiring.
Thanks for all the discussions over the years.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Ten years for me! Came because my partner sent me an interesting thread, stayed because of the interesting articles and thoughtful comments from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Thanks HN! I regularly open HN during lectures. There is no better way to show my students what software engineering entails and why I focus on certain topics.
Is SCRUM really as great as its evangelists claim? Let's read HN comments.
What are good use cases for UML? Let's check out HN.
Does anyone actually care about CoCoMo or CMMI? Let's read ... oh - nearly nobody's talking about it there. Maybe it won't be that relevant to the students.
shoutout to Algolia who maintains HN Search for these usecases
>What are good use cases for UML? Let's check out HN.
Are there good cases for UML outside the raison d'être of middle managers circa 2007?
My personal opinion (based in part on HN):
- In a nutshell: everyone should know about UML and how some relevant diagram types look. Nobody should use it religiously.
- Diagrams are great tools for communicating ideas and implementations on an abstract level, and for interactively thinking about ideas that can be drawn in some way. A diagram can also visually highlight problem areas (e.g., components with many dependencies).
- Good use cases for diagrams in SE are e.g., explaining high-level architecture to someone, thinking about and refining database schemas, documenting interaction flows, or giving an overview of class structure in automatically generated code documentation
- It is nice to have visual consistency - it makes parsing a diagram so much faster and less error-prone. UML provides sensible guidelines or inspiration on how to draw e.g., a sequence diagram or a class diagram. There is no need to re-invent the wheel.
- In most cases, knowing about the diagram types and their approximate design is enough. As probably very few people know what the different styles of arrows or boxes might mean, it is a good idea to annotate important elements with their meaning.
- For thinking/communication, drawing diagrams by hand is the best way. Excalidraw/tldraw are nice for stuff that should go into static documents.
- Documenting the state of a system with manually generated diagrams is tedious and requires constant updates. A better way is to auto-generate e.g., class diagrams using PlantUML or Mermaid.
- Nobody uses UML for designing complex systems and then auto-generating code.
The startup I work for is pretty flat. There's the chief product officer who is actually pretty technical, the chief technical officer, and engineers basically.
We use UMLs and flow charts in miro to diagram things from both a high level (for product to understand) to intricate details.
It works great!
Nerds!
(but seriously, I'm interested it's just everything I've seen before had the strong scent of "we're doing this nonsense because we believe we're supposed to but don't understand why")
It's useful to have a common language for diagrams (actors, storage, etc)
It's not useful for more than very abstract concepts though. If you're UMLing your entire Java app before you add another class/method/function, you're doing it wrong.
Yeah we don't go that overkill, we really just diagram surface area (how does the backend communicate with the frontend and through which apis and when, and when should the front end expect a socket message, etc)
As a method of communication between projects, it works wonderfully
Fortunately I've never worked for an org that did "stuff" for the sake of doing stuff, or at least I never lasted long with those orgs. In order to be lean and efficient we need to cut out all the stuff that doesn't serve the purpose of building product.
I've personally found sequence diagrams to be immensely valuable the handful of times I've worked with them. Both for documenting the intended way to use an API and for analyzing the ways the different components of a system can interact. This has often helped me escape my tendency to focus on the happy path when analyzing systems.
Having architecture diagrams is not fundamentally a bad thing, and standardizing the conventions for them is not fundamentally a bad thing. I think the thing that gave UML a terribly bad name was the cavalcade of early "zero code" or "low code" tools trying to turn your UML diagram into code; those were terrible.
Drawing things on whiteboards to see the architecture, absolutely.
The more formalism it has and the more it was insisted on was always a strong signal that was was happening was a middle management cargo cult and not actually useful work.
I believe that there exist organizations that derived value from this sort of thing, I just haven't seen them.
Certain UML diagrams can be useful for high-level documentation or for teaching concepts.
Almost 12 years of HN. I'm still a lurker, I'm sorry I don't contribute more, but I don't have much time and reading HN with a coffee in the morning is the best thing I can do. Thx everyone involved <3
Better than contribution, consider visiting /newest and upvote|flag things there. There're a lot of good articles lost in the haystack. Even if it's once in a while it's very good for the community.
In the old days of reddit, when it was almost lost as a community, that was called the Knights of New. A selfless system sadly ignored/killed by reddit admins and mods.
You need not be sorry for not contributing. Thanks for being here. HN is a place for learners and people who improve their lives by knowledge and building awesome user-centric products can make world a better place for others as well!
Same here - 12y. I've learned so much and one day hope to contribute back something significant to the community but haven't found a footing just yet.
You don’t have to contribute something significant. I don’t think it’s about how much one contributes, or now important it is. If you have an opinion - give it. If you have a question - ask it. If you have a criticism - tell it (respectfully). I often get the most out of HN when I’m asking questions. The best part about this place is that people answer them. Or gives you the background context that wasn’t in an article.
This post is a good start!
Commenting on hacker news is kind of like commenting on /r/askhistorians or asking a question on stackoverflow, it’s a tough crowd, I don’t blame you!
^^7
cheers to all you glorious bastards. i disagree with you on most things and quibble over pettiest crap, but know it is all in good fun. we are prolly in the weirdest point in computer history and get to see it make it through ( or not.. either is fine ). its a secret, but those annual affirtation are one of my favorite traditions.
here is to all the fun convos yet to come.
I’m thankful for this place and this sentiment. As a young programmer I never imagined having this erudite enclave, capable of maintaining a level head during difficult days. Here’s to having community…and I agree with about half of what y’all say, because I’m aggressively anchored at the average. :)
Happy Thanksgiving! 10+ solid years as a near daily HN lurker :)
Be sure to give your parents (and other seniors in your life) a phishing and subscriptions checkup this weekend!
https://edisoncode.com/articles/holiday-phone-safety-guide-f...
Been here 18 years. Almost never comment, but I come back everyday for the insightful comments. Thank you @dang for the great moderation and thank you to great HN community.
Upvoted. Let's get you up to double digits!
Happy Thanksgiving! This is the only site that passes my threshold for signal-to-noise ratio. I genuinely learn from discussions here. It humbles me to be on the same webpage as some of the most knowledgeable, ambitious, thoughtful folks across the globe. Thanks everyone for your active participation.
I've had an HN account for 17 years now. This is one of the last good places left on the web for intelligent conversation, and pretty much the last place I even want to post comments anymore honestly. Thank you @dang for the hard work on maintaining that. Hopefully this site can continue to be a bastion in an increasingly dismal social media environment.
My account is just a week apart from yours. Neocities is an excellent project btw, glad to see your passion for the web shine through it.
All of us old timers coming out for this one, eh? Also, when did I get so old?
I'm hoping I'm only at the halfway point in my life. So many cool and interesting things have developed in my existence, and there are so many more cool and interesting things to come! Looking forward as I have for the last 17 years to reading about them on HN as they happen.
Not sure what I would tell my young self back in the 90s first. Self driving cars, LLMs that can fix bugs I've been trying to fix for 12 years. Maybe I would start with "Linux distros where you don't have to manually compile 15 random dependencies to run a single piece of software".
12 years for me... young by comparison. But I was on slashdot in the late 90s if that counts.
Fifteen here, I think I found it by searching to see if a different Hacker News was still around (it wasn't) but I wasn't disappointed and stayed.
Happy Thanksgiving and I hope you had (or are having) a good day. Or if it wasn’t good—stressful, tiring, etc.—here’s to hoping for some great sleep.
I don’t remember kids being out of school for so long around Thanksgiving when I was younger. All I can hope for is eight hours of sleep after a full week of childcare. I guess I’m most thankful for teachers and schools being open.
6 years with you, guys! I don't usually write here (english it's not my forte), but I wanted to do it to tell you how important and cozy this place feels to me in 2025. It's like finding a bonfire in a Souls game, where the rest of the internet feels like it's been taken by an evil force.
Here's to another 6+ years!
Happy Thanksgiving / Happy post-Cranberry day!
Also: National Day of Mourning for some Native Americans
https://muwekma.org/blog/2023/september/what-does-thanksgivi...
Just completed 7 years on HN. This is the only social network I'm active on (if you don't count whatsapp). Awesome folks and amazing discussions!!
Wow, that made me look:
> Joined 17 years ago
Before bitcoin! Crazy
In these 15 years, HN was a website that shaped me and my worldview. It's a social circle that inspires me and broadens my perspective.
Holy cow... I signed up to HN 18 years ago. I am more of a behind-the-scenes guy in the tech world so I don't know most of you but I've enjoyed participating in this community over the years.
I hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving; here's to the next 18 years! :)
Happy thanksgiving all. In an era where algorithms on other platforms seem optimized for outrage and engagement bait, I'm grateful for HN's optimization for curiosity. It's one of the few places left where I can open a thread on a topic I disagree with and actually expect to have my mind changes -- or at least understand the opposing view better -- by the top comment.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. I'm new here and lurked for a year or so before posting. This is the only site I visit multiple times a day. It's kind of addictive.
To me, it's such a unique place with so many intelligent minds and great conversations. I wish I'd have found this place years ago.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone -- I've mostly been a lurker here over the last 20 years and I'm thankful for being able to interact with such a bright and vibrant community full of thinkers, doers and explorers -- you guys definitely changed my life for the better and inspired me in many, many ways.
Horrifyingly, my account appears to be eighteen years old.
The mythical utopian HN past never existed.
Hehe. You must be new here ;)
I'm very thankful for @dang and @tomhow keeping this site such high signal to noise ratio. It's a great place to spend time on the internet :).
Thankful for @dang and this community. Happy thanksgiving
Been lurking since 2011 or so. Dare I say that the average level of discourse has finally fallen to a level where I feel comfortable participating after over ten years of just reading.
That being said HN was and continues to be one of the most valuable resources for geeks on the net.
A new online law: Every community eventually degrades to the point I will feel like I fit in ;)
Any other resources that you recommend?
I'm here just under two years (I was browsing before creating an account) and I'm immensely grateful to have this in my life. HN is a tiny corner of the internet where I can consistently find high quality stories and learn something new every day. Not only that, I also get to interact with brilliant people and have meaningful conversations, unlike so many other internet forums that are just full of hate.
Thanks to the moderators, commenters and the whole community for building and maintaining this space of the internet and adding some value to my day!
Seems weird to say, but I've been posting here for seventeen years now. And in that time, can I say that the quality of the discourse has slipped some? Well... if I'm being honest, probably yeah. A little. But at the same time, I can still honestly say that HN is still easily the best community of this sort on the 'net, at least that I'm aware of. OK, Lobste.rs has some merit, but the problem there is that the community there is arguably still a little too small, and you just don't get the variety and volume of interesting discussion you get here. But the level of discourse is high there as well.
Anyway, I find HN to be a wonderful refuge from a lot of the absurdity that's "out there" and I will happily throw in my own "Thanks, guys!" to dang and tomhow. And to pg for starting this whole thing back in the day.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and here's to more years to come!
17 years? Damn, that's a mindcrime!
Relatable by the way. Though, not 17 years, haha, "just" 10 :')
Where else will you be able to have discussions with PhD’s, entrepreneurs, leaders, doers, and specialists in literally every field?
No where but here.
Eighteen years here. I am not American but I think this is a holiday that we can all celebrate as reminder that we should be grateful for what and specially for who we have, independently what we don't have.
A fellow 18-yearer here. I am very grateful for the discussions and insights and expertise and recollections I see every day from all over the world.
Happy Thanksgiving! I have been here at least for the last 12 years. I open the website at least twice a day - once in the morning when starting work, and once late evening before logging out for the day. The mantra I follow is that if something doesn't trend on HN it's not worth paying attention to.
Initially, I would only click on the links and jump off HN but over the last few years I have been more interested in the comments and the discussion.
Thank you everyone one for such a great community!
I don't "do" Thanksgiving (I'm not a USian), but I have family that do, so hope that yesterday and the short break for all was good for those who enjoyed it.
I've been here 13 years and almost 3 months, meaning I'm averaging ~44 karma a month, and it's one of the few gotos I don't consider harmful.
I think most of us here would see the damage that's happened to so many communities - all of them with their eternal Septembers - and I thought the last one that would hold out because I could curate what I saw would be reddit, but no, that's gone the way of so many before it for me.
HN is an experiment in a niche community with its own broad definition of "whatever is interesting", its own values and its own quirks. It's large enough to be vibrant and diverse, but small enough to have an uncodified but recognisable culture.
If there's one change I'm going to make in the next year though, it's relating to myself. I want most of my karma next year to come from my own Show HN posts: I want to build things and share those things, not just jump in on comment threads. Let's see how that goes.
Happy holidays to all, and may the Winter to be kind to you and yours.
Only been here five -point- five, but it's already far outlasted my tenure at other venues.
For non-Americans: Thanksgiving is a big national holiday in the US; celebrated on the last Thursday of November.
Its origin story is that a bunch of recent immigrants were having a rough time of it, and were helped by aboriginal Americans.
What happened after ... well, that's another story.
It's a big "family" holiday. Americans travel all over, to gather with their families at the Gorging Table.
what happened after the pilgrims were helped by those nice people?
I won't get into it, but it's not difficult to figure out.
> "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
- Mark Twain
Happy Thanksgiving! I’ve been reading HN for a while but only recently started participating. It’s rare to find a corner of the internet that has maintained this level of thoughtful discourse for so long. Huge thanks to the mods for their hard work.
Thank you all for challenging my beliefs and giving me a world to explore outside the law.
Pretty new poster, but I learn so much from HN. Great way to curate and see amazing stuff
Happy Thanksgiving! ... I just wanted to express my gratitude to the Commodore 64 personal computer I received as a Christmas gift in 1982 (or maybe '83?). I didn't know it then but it set the course for the remainder of my life. I just wanted another device to play video games (Atari 2600 was over), but once I discovered "programming", playing video games turned into tweaking, cracking and even creating video games. I was in 6th grade; I used to stay awake until the dawn, even on school nights, programming and trading games (300 baud modem on a single phone line). My grades dropped, but thankfully my Mom didn't care; she knew what I was doing and how much I was learning. Honestly, many of the basic concepts I use today I taught myself when was I was 12 years old on the Commodore 64. So, thank you, Commodore. You're 64KB computer impacted my life more than, probably, anything else in my life.
Happy thanksgiving!
I've lurked even longer than I've been a user... Probably about 15 years. It's been fun to watch several generations of kindred spirits join the party. For the most part, I think they assimilate, so the spirit of HN remains strong while new perspectives are added to the mix. It's still one of the best communities around.
Thanks to the mods and all of you!
Happy Thanksgiving @dang, @tomhow, and the HN community! Almost 17 years here, and it's hard to overstate how much I learned from y'all.
Through tech cycles, heated debates, and some inevitable fads, the limitless curiosity of this community remains inspiring. Thank you mods and YC for staying true to the original hacker ethos.
Almost 4 years here. Thank you all! Thanks to the creators of the site. Thanks to the ones that maintain the site. Thanks to the ones that moderate the conversations (that do an amazing job).
And special thanks to all those that have the fire of truth and curiosity that keep alive this great community!
Thank you.
Happy Thanksgiving !
I haven't been participating as much lately because life got in the way but I'm still thankful this community exists, it remains one of the very few places I can have high level discussions with fellow inquiring minds.
Wow, 13 years already :)
Thank you, been a rough year (mentally, financially) - super grateful to everyone here on HN!
Here's to a good next year.
I’ve been a long time lurker (7 years now I think) and finally made an acccount. Thanks HN. You bring joy and enthusiasm to this hectic World Wide Web we all share. The distributed asynchronous town square I never asked for! <3
Huge thanks to the mods and YC for creating this space. HN is legendary in its own time. Hoping @prodigycorp and the result of us can enjoy another 15 years of thoughtful hackish conversation and news.
Grateful for all the people here who make this world a little better all the tiem.
I disagree. It's better than ever. A lot of diversity in opinons. Mix of deep experts in many domains.
I've only been participating for a few months (lurking for much longer) and I've got to say HN has been the best news aggregation experience I've ever had. I hope to be here for many years to come!
HN has been a kaleidoscope of the human psyche. idlewords dissing pg, Michael o' church's rants, Terry's slow break into insanity, etc. I'm thankful above all that this place still exists.
Happy Thanksgiving! I've been here just five years, but it's my main source for discovering interesting things in this world. Thanks to everyone who makes positive contributions here.
Lurking, occasionally commenting, rarely posting. I've read HN everyday since I started working in the industry since March 2016. I appreciate what HN is and the shared culture.
Thanks all, and have a great day.
Thankful for the overall balance this site still manages to find between diversity of viewpoint and civility. It gets spicy sometimes, but I like it that way.
Hope everyone's year finishes better than it started.
Happy Thanksgiving!! 12 yrs of learning and lurking. Amazing community!!
This thread, in and of itself, demonstrates the incredible quality of this community. Thank you to all of you, and especially to @dang and @tomhow for thanklessly holding us all together.
I'm a serial entrepreneur from China, and I've been here for 14 years now. HN is still the website I check every single day.
Truly grateful to everyone in this community.
17 years here (wow). I don’t post much but I get a lot out of this site and it’s one of my few daily reads. Grateful for the site, its mods, and the contributors.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving all.
Mostly a lurker. Been here over 10 years, but created my HN account 9 years ago. HN has been an invaluable source for me over they years.
It's been 6 years for me, and I've learned quite a bit here. HN remains one of the few places I hang out on a daily basis.
18 years. The site has become a hotbed of political discussion recently, and I do wish the manual unflagging was stopped, but other people are right when they say that Startup News/Hacker News has remained relevant for far longer than other sites that started around the same time. The only one I can think of that stayed relevant for that long is Ars Technica.
But ARS is not what it used to be. Sadly. The content is still decent, but not the forum so much. My arrival at HN nearly 8 years ago was about when I wasn’t seeing community there anymore.
Merry Thanksgiving everyone! And a special thanks to the mods for helping to maintain such high quality discussion over the years.
Thanks HN for being awesome. Grateful to you all, @dang and @tomhow. Learning something new every day for over half a decade now.
15 years here too. I turn 40 today. Grateful for this community. I quit social media years ago but still enjoy the discourse here.
Happy birthday! I hope you have (at least) another 40 of health and hackery :)
Thanks, mods. As a moderator of a relatively popular WoW forum back in its heyday, your work is seen and appreciated.
Happy thanksgiving all. Switched from ./ to HN and haven't regretted a single day. Hope you all have a great one!
12 years here, agree that this is one of the best communities still active. Thank you HN team!
Thanks Dan, Tom, and the others who keep this a place that still brings joy and satisfies the curiosity brain itch.
For those of you who don't celebrate Thanksgiving, wishing you a delcious Southern pecan pie anyway, and more!
I can't believe I've been around these parts for 17 years... Thank you for the inspiration to take a look at my join date. I feel the same as you about the discussions here, there is always a level of depth (and silliness) that I appreciate about the banter and interactions here.
Here's to 17 more! <3
Why does't HN respect requests to delete accounts? That doesn't seem so nice as a community. I know they give an excuse, but... I have to admit though I did find a job on here once so it is somewhat useful, but I'm not Stockholm Syndrome-ish about it
Hard to believe it's been 13 years!
HN has been a wonderful source of both news and community - it connected me to my industry in ways that could only have been achieved otherwise by moving to SF or NYC.
In a way, it feels like a great continuation of my Slashdot years.
10 years here! I don't remember how I found out about HN, but I've been reading this since A-levels. I didn't understand much back then, and was just browsing around.
10 years past, and now working as a software engineer, at least I understand a bit more.
14 years here. Thanks @dang and @tomhow.
17 years and it’s been the best site I use daily. Thanks to everyone keeping this place pleasant!
I think it is safe for me say that HN has had a very large role in moulding my personality. A left-leaning atheist who loves computing and is often at odds with the current zeitgeist in India, I find my true home behind a computer screen.. Slashdot was my original initiation, and I moved to Hacker News rather late after a successful YC application. Not much of a contributor, but everyday starts with at least half an hour spent reading the comments here (who RTFAs anyway huh?).
Thank you all. Without you, life would've been much simpler, but not better!
Cheers!
15 years also for me, mostly lurking from a remote location in France, reading some discussions every single day and continuously learning new things. This community had so much impact on my professional life as a full stack software engineer!
I discovered the world around Ruby on Rails, then the modern JavaScript ecosystem (and CoffeeScript followed later by TypeScript), burned out, focused on Ruby, added Rust to my toolbox, wrote a small hobby operating system that had to have its own Lisp dialect of course. I was inspired to create so many side projects over the years, most of them open source, thanks to the influence of this community.
I also tried my hands at starting a startup obviously, multiple times, but I'm a solo dev and didn't succeed at finding a profitable niche for myself, instead I applied my knowledge to better understand the business and product sides of the startups I've been working for which made me a better engineer for sure.
This community almost made me move to the Silicon Valley, but instead I traveled the world as a digital nomad when everyone was doing it, and came back home to settle down in a forest close to my roots.
Reading you all daily I can imagine what could have been my life at the heart of the tech world, and at the same time I'm happy to read its pulse from afar.
I hope HN will still be here in 15 more years, thanks everyone!
Just wanted to say, I enjoyed reading about your story, wishing you well from all the way in California. This place is pretty great that it brings so many of us together from different backgrounds but share a love for tech, learning, and more.
Happy Thanksgiving fellas, proud to be part of this secret community comprised of only the cream of society's elite crop making even the pioneers among the early freemasons look puny in juxtaposition. Cheers!
Definitely grateful to have this site and appreciative of the people that make it what it is. I check in multiple times a day and always find something new (or at least new to me), interesting and frequently useful!
I left a large software corp last year to co-found a startup, launching myself in the world of OSS. I couldn't be more grateful to the HN community for introducing me to great concepts and tools!
Just looked it up: 14 years already and very proud to be a part of this community. :-)
Happy Thanksgiving
9 years and it's the website I check daily more than any others! Happy Thanksgiving!
I often get more excited about the commentary and what I’ll learn from interesting experts in the HN comments than the original link itself. Thanks to all who contribute their thoughts here.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
It will be twelve years next month. I remember signing up as a naive student attracted by all the shiny things.
I'd say HN had a big part in shaping and honing my critical thinking.
Thank You !
Couldn't get green beans, so had to pivot and made Green Pea Casserole.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, thankful for this community - it’s one of the few places left on the internet I can visit each day and learn something genuinely interesting or useful.
Happy Thanksgiving y'all! Also grateful for this community!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Checking in here almost daily is always a bright spot. Keep up the good work @dang and thanks for making this a place we want to be.
Thanks Dang your a LEGEND
Over 6 years here, and another two lurning: Thanks for the absolute brilliant insights, and plenty of laughs.
Thank you all. Thank you for laughing at my jokes.
Happy Thanksgiving
Hey, community! Thank you for this opportunity to connect and feel closeness to the best parts and people in our industry.
Thank you for your open mindedness, smarts, stupid fun and lovable nerdiness.
I feel at home here.
One thing that makes me sad are dystopian fears. Not sure if this is warranted or not, but certainly get my dose of dread from HN. But thank you for being so sensitive and caring in this.
Happy thanksgiving.
Grateful for the intellectual curiosity and respectful debate on this board. Has kept me coming back nearly every day for over a decade.
A decade for me. HN has cultivated a much better community than virtually anywhere else on the internet. dang and tomhow are awesome.
its been 10+ years for me here ..
Thanks for being around everyone.
I used to tell my father about communities that build them around a particular coffee shop with tables that have different kind of conversations ..
YC conversations are the best ( least fluff, more stuff) There is no garden without a gardener.
Thank you @dang and @tomhow .. ( before this post I had no clue who you were so thanks to @prodigycorp as well )
19 years here. Been a big part of my life - grateful for showing me a window into a totally different world ever since high school.
I am very grateful for this site and community.
Here for ~15-16 years through various accounts. HT
Unrelated question, but I thought cattiness meant to be rude? Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean with how you use the word?
I meant cattiness!
11 years here (more without a user), HN has consistently been the top sites i visit everyday.
thanks all and happy thanksgiving!
I'm certainly thankful for Hacker News!
It’s not the same account but I realized I’ve been around since 2009. Time flies! Happy thanksgiving everyone.
Nostalgia is a heck of a drug. :-)
Happy Thanksgiving!
been lurking for most of my adult life (and it shows :-))
Thanks HN! You make me smarter every (other) day.
Really enjoy this forum. Thank you everyone for building a great community.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!! =)
Thanks for all of the hootin' n' hollerin' over the past ~decade or so.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Been here 17 years. Crazy to think about how much has happened since then.
Happy Thanksgiving! Wish we could all meet up and argue about LLMs!
I am thankful for the HN community. Coming here since 2011 :)
Mmm. Joined in 2008.
I still get value. But there's too much noise I think. I also think I'm older now and I'm more adverse to "done it, seen it"
The odd "made an app to do basic thing xyz" doesn't get my attention anymore.
Also, posts related to science get a hard scrutiny. Most posts are just cross references to poorly moderated subreddits. That, or they're just posts directly from archx with no external paper references. I'm not a scientist, but I know enough to know when to ignore bullshit.
Most posts to HN are still mostly bullshit. But I know enough to occasionally see something interesting. That's may be 4 times a year at this point.
...
I also want to add more context. I've been in the Anathem ideology for about 20 years now. It has shaped my world view. Call me fra geuis.
If you want to present what you think are new ideas, be prepared to back them up. When we get the Loreites up and running, I'll refer you to them.
Happy Thanksgiving HN
I had to check, I'm at 8 years, stay awesome HN'ers!
reminds me of arthur saying "no one said they were thankful for me" every single thanksgiving day lol
12 years. first time commenting this hour.
I feel compelled to point out that your account is almost 5 years old (although it could be an alt), and it has several previous comments associated with it, including some in 2023.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! love HN!
Happy thanksgiving y'all! :-)
18 years here. Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
Thank you, happy Thanksgiving.
Thanks you Lord for the food.
10 years. Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy thanksgiving everyone!
<3
Happy Thanksgiving, HN!
I’m thankful for tech
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving!
happy thanksgiving y'all :)
Happy Thanksgiving!
Use this day to eat good food, converse with relatives, and rest from the usual madness. Peace on Earth.
Another 15-yearer here too! Thank you HN, and for all the work you do @dang and @tomhow
Happy thanksgiving american bros, don't get too fat.
It’s funny what passes as humor in europe is crass for others.
They invented Ozemipc. Restraint is unamerican.
Utopia is nigh.
flavortown is adjacent.
Why did I only see this yesterday?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sOsqXKr4l30
Happy Thanksgiving, HN!
I’ve been more of a lurker than a poster over the years, but this place has shaped how I think about tech, work, and the future more than any other corner of the internet.
Huge thanks to @dang, @tomhow, YC, and everyone who shows up here with curiosity and good faith. The signal-to-noise ratio here is still unmatched.
Here’s to many more years of weird, smart, opinionated conversations.
Yes, FUCK MIT. They killed aaron, a brilliant engineer and free thinker
Before the self-congratulatory toxic positivity gets too far out of hand:
https://nmcsw.org/indigenous-resilience-thanksgiving-story/
What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066132 and marked it offtopic.
You would do that. You're so unethical. Remember when you covered up uBiome?
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=ubiome
Of course we didn't:
YC-backed uBiome is basically Theranos-lite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30899352 - April 2022 (173 comments)
SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26531087 - March 2021 (380 comments)
UBiome Offices Searched by FBI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19760449 - April 2019 (56 comments)
Many more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The interesting thing is why this (false) accusation appears now, years later. I don't recall people saying it at the time, which makes sense because it was obviously untrue.
You removed it from the directory. Not very honest, is it?
Also, how is criticizing Aaron Swartz off topic? The other commenter brought it up. No one made him commit suicide but HN has a boner for this guy like he's a victim.
The YC directory is a YC feature, not an HN one. I'm pretty certain HN mods (dang, tomhow) have no direct influence over that, though they might care how inclusion/exclusion of investment embarrassments reflects on HN itself.
HN itself clearly hasn't shied away from critical coverage of that venture.
Your other argument shows a distinct lack of empathy and a certain disregard for facts of the matter.
I consider it to be part of the hacker's spirit to bend or break unjust laws when the situation calls for it.
So I wouldn't gloss over the specific law(s) he broke, so much as I would outright celebrate that he did so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto
I think anyone can be a hacker. Anyone can break any laws. But to kill yourself over it? It's in the extreme. I don't believe law enforcement has to take the blame for that.
The only reference to Swartz that I see in the parent comment is:
> Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.
And the rest was just upbeat talk in general.
Unless the parent comment was edited, I don't understand why you responded:
> What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
By "here", I assume you mean "HN in general", but your comment comes off as loaded (e.g., "did to himself" sounds like a conscious attempt at asserting a framing), and the timing seems poor (i.e., that particular innocuous comment, on this particular day).
I hope you hold the same contempt for every tech company and their "rules only apply to the poor" attitude about copyright.
I'm going to break the law right now and watch some illegally downloaded movies. MPAA RIAA FBI CIA NSA come at me
If we had a thousand more people like him, maybe this world wouldn't be such a shitty place.
Take heart: there are a lot of people like Aaron Swartz. Of course you'll find them in proportionally fewer numbers, when you look somewhere that attracts with money/power.
Laws are necessary evils. Zealotry in the application of law helps absolutely no one and is one of the evils the necessity of laws creates.
Aaron Swartz deserved, at worst, a slap on the wrist, not the kind of severe harassment in the name of the law which he got.
not for the indians.