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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.

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.

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!

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?

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")

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

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!

^^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 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.

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...

Happy Thanksgiving y'all! Also grateful for this community!

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.

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! 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.

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.

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.

Happy Thanksgiving / Happy post-Cranberry day!

Also: National Day of Mourning for some Native Americans

https://muwekma.org/blog/2023/september/what-does-thanksgivi...

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Horrifyingly, my account appears to be eighteen years old.

The mythical utopian HN past never existed.

Hehe. You must be new here ;)

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.

reminds me of arthur saying "no one said they were thankful for me" every single thanksgiving day lol

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 :).

Happy Thanksgiving!

Been here 17 years. Crazy to think about how much has happened since then.

Thankful for @dang and this community. Happy thanksgiving

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.

Thanks, mods. As a moderator of a relatively popular WoW forum back in its heyday, your work is seen and appreciated.

Thank you all for challenging my beliefs and giving me a world to explore outside the law.

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 :')

Pretty new poster, but I learn so much from HN. Great way to curate and see amazing stuff

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.

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 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!

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.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

17 years and it’s been the best site I use daily. Thanks to everyone keeping this place pleasant!

I am thankful for the HN community. Coming here since 2011 :)

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

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 :)

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!

Merry Thanksgiving everyone! And a special thanks to the mods for helping to maintain such high quality discussion over the years.

Happy Thanksgiving HN

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!

Thank You !

Couldn't get green beans, so had to pivot and made Green Pea Casserole.

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.

9 years and it's the website I check daily more than any others! Happy Thanksgiving!

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.

Thanks HN for being awesome. Grateful to you all, @dang and @tomhow. Learning something new every day for over half a decade now.

Grateful for all the people here who make this world a little better all the tiem.

I am very grateful for this site and community.

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.

Happy thanksgiving all. Switched from ./ to HN and haven't regretted a single day. Hope you all have a great one!

Thanks Dan, Tom, and the others who keep this a place that still brings joy and satisfies the curiosity brain itch.

Just looked it up: 14 years already and very proud to be a part of this community. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving

Thank you, been a rough year (mentally, financially) - super grateful to everyone here on HN!

been lurking for most of my adult life (and it shows :-))

Thanks HN! You make me smarter every (other) day.

Thanks for all of the hootin' n' hollerin' over the past ~decade or so.

14 years here. Thanks @dang and @tomhow.

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!! 12 yrs of learning and lurking. Amazing community!!

Nostalgia is a heck of a drug. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!! =)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I'm certainly thankful for Hacker News!

Thanks Dang your a LEGEND

I had to check, I'm at 8 years, stay awesome HN'ers!

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.

Happy Thanksgiving to all! love HN!

Here for ~15-16 years through various accounts. HT

Thank you, happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks you Lord for the food.

Happy thanksgiving y'all! :-)

Happy thanksgiving everyone!

10 years. 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.

Happy Thanksgiving!

<3

Happy Thanksgiving, HN!

Happy thanksgiving!

For those of you who don't celebrate Thanksgiving, wishing you a delcious Southern pecan pie anyway, and more!

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.

happy thanksgiving y'all :)

It’s not the same account but I realized I’ve been around since 2009. Time flies! Happy thanksgiving everyone.

I’m thankful for tech

18 years here. Happy Thanksgiving!

Another 15-yearer here too! Thank you HN, and for all the work you do @dang and @tomhow

Happy Thanksgiving!

Use this day to eat good food, converse with relatives, and rest from the usual madness. Peace on Earth.

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Aaron broke the law. He knew what he was doing. Remember when Dang & co tried to cover up uBiome?

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=ubiome

Nobody has covered up uBiome: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

And it's always been HN moderation policy that we intervene less on negative stories about YC or YC-backed companies than other stories: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Even if we didn't have that policy, “suppressing” a story on HN doesn't keep it out of the news, so it would be futile to do that.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066132 and marked it off topic, because it's never ok to be a jerk about deceased people.

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

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.

You say anyone can be a hacker? Aaron was 100x the hacker you could ever dream to be.

I'm not claiming anything. You're too emotional for this conversation. I'm out.

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.

[flagged]

That's every day.

Today we do that, and eat turkey.

Wasn't Thanksgiving a practice before people came to the US? The US now does it, but they didn't start it. I only know it because I'm Dutch and I wanted to see if the Dutchies were somehow involved (because they are way more often than they should be). Here's a source I quickly found but there are many sources on it [1].

There's more to Thanksgiving than only the US.

[1] https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/how-netherl...

this always gets brought up, but realistically no one ever cares or brings this up from the perspective of celebrating American origins, but rather just a reminder to be thankful for things in your life that matter to you. I don't see the problem with this

> realistically no one ever cares or brings this up from the perspective of celebrating American origins

It's still a very common narrative that's historically been an integral part of the myth around this holiday. And it's simply a fact that the Wampanoag and other tribes of the Eastern U.S. even to this day dedicate what we call Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_Mourning_(Unit... A similar memorial gathering is held on Alcatraz Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unthanksgiving_Day

It's a day some people in the US don't have to work so I think that's something worth celebrating

North American natives were exterminating and enslaving each other long before the Europeans got there.

Nobody has anything to be proud of.

The term "slave" encompasses a lot of wildly different kinds of unfree labor. The racialized system most people think of from transatlantic slavery is a very recent thing.

Nothing resembling that was widespread in precolumbian North America. The earliest similar systems I'm aware of took root in the 17th and 18th centuries, well into the early colonial period.

Research what the Iroquois did to the Huron people, what the Apache did to the Pueblos, and what the Aztecs did to everybody.

The continent what a slaughter show for thousands of years.

What I said was a much more precise statement than "there was no violence". Nothing you've mentioned is a counterexample.

The slaves of early 17th century Iroquois were not dehumanized property like colonial era natives and Africans. This is what I meant by pointing out that the term "slavery" encompasses a vast number of radically different types of unfree servitude.

The Apache example is both not similar to Atlantic slavery, and mainly from the 18th century period where I specifically said such systems existed among North American natives.

If you're trying to make a point about the racial hierarchy within the Aztecs, the term Mexica is much more precise. If you're just referring to the slave social class within the empire itself, I can't imagine why you think it's remotely similar to colonial slavery. Aztec slaves weren't property in the sense of colonial era slavery. They had to consent to sale, only their labor was actually sellable, and it wasn't hereditary, among other differences.

While it was (mostly?) unintentional, the biological warfare committed by Europeans makes for a different story than anything that happened before they arrived. The Americas weren't a paradise, but neither were they a slaughterhouse.

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

not for the indians.