Get the latest tech news

Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News


HN should be treated as an external comment section for the internet to the extent that it can’t substitute for the internet, much less for your own thinking. At its best, HN is a map to new questions and a window onto new angles. The landscape itself remains elsewhere.

Despite its spartan appearance and learning curve, HN boasts over ten million monthly visits (according to SimilarWeb data), outperforming popular tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget. Its domain reveals it’s an “add-on,” powered and hosted by search SaaS provider Algolia(a YC alum); it’s not only blazingly fast but also supports fuzzy matching and can unearth discussions from the deepest corners of the site. The prompt design, inspired by Simon Willison’s work and adjusted based on personal experience, reliably summarizes the themes and stances within the comments, complete with original quotes and usernames for easy reference.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of page

page

Photo of Hacker News

Hacker News

Photo of personal guide

personal guide

Related news:

News photo

Sony's Xperia 10 VII redesign borrows from Pixel's iconic camera aesthetics

News photo

This Page Is a Quine (2021)

News photo

Imgur protest covers the front page in anti-MediaLab memes