Ask HN: What's the best thing you came across on Hacker News?
I&#x27;m going to pivot my answer:  it&#x27;s not <i>the best thing</i> I&#x27;ve found on HN, it&#x27;s <i>how I use HN to find things</i>.<p>- Ask questions about things you&#x27;re unsure of, even if it&#x27;s just TLAs.[1]  I also like to ask for references, and those can occasionally be real gems.<p>- Respond to others.  Especially, respond in a &quot;yes, and...&quot; rather than a &quot;no, but ...&quot; style, where that&#x27;s possible.<p>- Avoid tendentious arguments.  I&#x27;ll point out corrections, but try to keep those short where possible.[2]  Changing minds is ... difficult at best.  Leaving clues for other readers may have value.<p>- Skip the main page and hit the lists: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;lists">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;lists</a>&gt;.  &quot;Best&quot;, &quot;Invited&quot;, and &quot;Pool&quot; especially are worth exploring.<p>- If you find someone interesting, check to see what they&#x27;ve submitted.  Often individual&#x27;s submissions are interesting curations of their own, though often these fail to survive the HN queue.<p>- <i>Use search.</i>  I rely on HN somewhat to search terms or individuals of interest, and to look for commentary on articles I turn up to see if there&#x27;s any illuminating relevant discussion (especially older articles).  This isn&#x27;t always successful, but it&#x27;s virtually always worth the effort, particularly using DuckDuckGo&#x27;s !bang search capability:  &quot;!hn &lt;search terms&gt;&quot;.  A blank search with a date range serves as a &quot;best of day&#x2F;week&#x2F;month&#x2F;year&quot; feature (see comment below).<p>- Try to read the article first, or at least <i>early</i> in your perusal of the comments thread.  Comments ... often ... deviate from and&#x2F;or are only very vaguely grounded in the article itself.<p>- There are a lot of people shooting from the hip.  There are also some absolute domain experts and Internet legends who drop by.  It&#x27;s quite an eclectic crowd, though the gems may be well hidden.<p>- You can read an individual&#x27;s comments and posts from their profile.  Reading the dang&#x27;s (HN&#x27;s moderator) comments is a good way to familiarise yourself with HN&#x27;s culture and norms:  &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=dang">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=dang</a>&gt;  You can also email mods (hn@ycombinator.com) with questions or concerns about the site and&#x2F;or your account and activity.<p>- Karma and votes count for far less than you&#x27;d think, though they tend to filter out obvious crud pretty well.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in things I&#x27;ve found interesting on HN, I&#x27;ve favourited far too many submissions.  There might be some gems (and embarrassments) amongst those:  &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;favorites?id=dredmorbius">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;favorites?id=dredmorbius</a>&gt;<p>I&#x27;ve also been looking at HN&#x27;s historical front-page activity and have a sense of the topics which are most covered (based on classifying the submitted site).  The top 20 (+ &quot;UNCLASSIFIED&quot;) of those represent 97.6% of all front-page posts, and are:<p><pre><code>  Class                  Stories    Votes  (mean) Comments  (mean)
          UNCLASSIFIED:    63543 12353558  194.41  5492437   86.44
                  blog:    22711  4023053  177.14  1882979   82.91
          general news:    15144  2927086  193.28  1904722  125.77
             tech news:    13883  2254571  162.40  1261577   90.87
           programming:    12856  2814625  218.93   957105   74.45
       corporate comm.:     8655  2092856  241.81   981934  113.45
    academic &#x2F; science:     8463  1451758  171.54   609273   71.99
                   n&#x2F;a:     7294  1143594  156.79   848020  116.26
         business news:     5327   934668  175.46   695350  130.53
      general interest:     3846   683416  177.70   395366  102.80
          social media:     2151   707530  328.93   372925  173.37
              software:     2085   466503  223.74   188013   90.17
            technology:     1613   292982  181.64   133882   83.00
                 video:     1463   249221  170.35    94161   64.36
   general info (wiki):     1144   180039  157.38    72192   63.10
            government:     1009   274549  272.10   162660  161.21
        misc documents:      724   127352  175.90    54601   75.42
                   law:      720   183559  254.94    66061   91.75
       tech discussion:      702   128731  183.38    52805   75.22
          science news:      625    94731  151.57    48919   78.27
    general discussion:      609   180094  295.72    82509  135.48
                 Other:     4315
                 Total:   178882
</code></pre>
(Data through 21-6-2023, code is sort of an evolving situation, and the tallies above fix some errors in other recent similar posts, though overall magnitude shifts are fairly small.)<p><i>Edits:</i>  A few late tweaks and additions partially based on my follow-up comment below.<p>________________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. Three letter acronyms.  See also ETLAs (extended TLAs) and DETLAs (double-extended ...).<p>2. There are ... many ... exceptions to this.  It&#x27;s a goal and aspiration, not an accomplishment.