Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving

556 points by prodigycorp a day ago

I’ve been a part of this community for fifteen years. Despite the yearly bemoaning of HN’s quality compared to its mythical past, I’ve found that it’s the one community that has remained steadfast as a source of knowledge, cattiness, and good discussion.

Thank you @dang and @tomhow.

Here's to another year.

kyledrake an hour ago

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.

  • Donald 12 minutes ago

    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.

  • fragmede an hour ago

    All of us old timers coming out for this one, eh? Also, when did I get so old?

    • kyledrake 21 minutes ago

      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".

    • anonu 20 minutes ago

      12 years for me... young by comparison. But I was on slashdot in the late 90s if that counts.

jetsnoc 21 hours ago

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!

raphman 6 hours ago

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.

  • swyx 3 hours ago

    shoutout to Algolia who maintains HN Search for these usecases

  • colechristensen 2 hours ago

    >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?

    • abustamam 43 minutes ago

      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!

    • JoshTriplett an hour ago

      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.

batrat 6 hours ago

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

  • drewnick 4 hours ago

    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.

    • mbreese 2 hours ago

      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!

sndean 2 hours ago

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.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 8 hours ago

^^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.

  • jazzejeff1 6 minutes ago

    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. :)

Inviz 4 hours ago

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.

breckinloggins 2 hours ago

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! :)

trevor 6 hours ago

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.

MinimalAction 6 hours ago

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.

zkmon 8 hours ago

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!!

  • fcoury 8 hours ago

    Wow, that made me look:

    > Joined 17 years ago

AstroNutt 2 hours ago

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.

mchusma 38 minutes ago

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

cm2012 an hour ago

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.

skeptrune 5 hours ago

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 :).

mikewarot an hour ago

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.

anteloper 8 hours ago

Thankful for @dang and this community. Happy thanksgiving

reactordev 6 hours ago

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.

huherto 8 hours ago

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.

  • ilamont 6 hours ago

    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.

dawnerd an hour ago

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

treetalker 7 hours ago

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

kylecazar 3 hours ago

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!

mindcrime 19 hours ago

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!

  • mettamage 9 hours ago

    17 years? Damn, that's a mindcrime!

    Relatable by the way. Though, not 17 years, haha, "just" 10 :')

picardo 8 hours 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.

awaseem 8 hours ago

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

guiambros 7 hours ago

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.

rsynnott 8 hours ago

Horrifyingly, my account appears to be eighteen years old.

The mythical utopian HN past never existed.

  • jacquesm 6 hours ago

    Hehe. You must be new here ;)

photon_lines 7 hours 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.

culanuchachamim 4 hours ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago

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.

  • siva7 5 hours ago

    what happened after the pilgrims were helped by those nice people?

    • ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago

      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

calvin 5 hours ago

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!

jbot27 2 hours ago

I am very grateful for this site and community.

ompogUe 2 hours ago

Thank You !

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

mise_en_place 5 hours ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts 4 hours ago

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

amerine 7 hours ago

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

GaryBluto 6 hours ago

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!

Etheryte 4 hours ago

Unrelated question, but I thought cattiness meant to be rude? Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean with how you use the word?

s_c_r 9 hours ago

15 years here too. I turn 40 today. Grateful for this community. I quit social media years ago but still enjoy the discourse here.

  • cmckn 8 hours ago

    Happy birthday! I hope you have (at least) another 40 of health and hackery :)

uzername 6 hours ago

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.

amruthreddi 5 hours ago

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

mpalmer 7 hours ago

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.

tevon 7 hours ago

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.

owlninja 8 hours ago

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

TheAtomic 8 hours ago

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

unkeptbarista 6 hours ago

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.

xarope 5 hours ago

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

toomuchtodo 5 hours ago

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

hilti 6 hours ago

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

Happy Thanksgiving

regera 6 hours ago

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

dofdial 4 hours ago

12 years. first time commenting this hour.

  • LorenDB 4 hours ago

    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.

kraddypatties 6 hours ago

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

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

sqircles 6 hours ago

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

peterclary 8 hours ago

14 years here. Thanks @dang and @tomhow.

ScottishGandhi 7 hours ago

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

bytearray 9 hours ago

Nostalgia is a heck of a drug. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Minor49er 12 hours ago

I'm certainly thankful for Hacker News!

tumidpandora 5 hours ago

Happy Thanksgiving to all! love HN!

iancmceachern 8 hours ago

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

unkulunkulu 8 hours ago

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.

drfeanki 8 hours ago

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

ianred 6 hours ago

Thank you, happy Thanksgiving.

pizlonator 8 hours ago

Happy thanksgiving y'all! :-)

stonking 3 hours ago

Happy thanksgiving!

LPisGood 8 hours ago

Happy thanksgiving everyone!

keepamovin 8 hours ago

10 years. Happy Thanksgiving!

ryandv 8 hours ago

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.

jadenPete 8 hours ago

Happy Thanksgiving, HN!

fuzzfactor 5 hours ago

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

nailer 6 hours ago

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.

  • travisgriggs 6 hours ago

    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.

ppqqrr 5 hours ago

not for the indians.

qntmfred 8 hours ago

happy thanksgiving y'all :)

dyauspitr 8 hours ago

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

moomoo11 8 hours ago

I’m thankful for tech

jasonlotito 8 hours ago

18 years here. Happy Thanksgiving!

chrisrickard 8 hours ago

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

RickJWagner 10 hours ago

Happy Thanksgiving!

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

cactusplant7374 3 hours ago

What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.

  • arcanemachiner 3 hours ago

    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

    • cactusplant7374 3 hours ago

      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.

      • WD-42 2 hours ago

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

        • cactusplant7374 2 hours ago

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

  • neilv 2 hours ago

    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).

  • WhyOhWhyQ 2 hours ago

    I hope you hold the same contempt for every tech company and their "rules only apply to the poor" attitude about copyright.

  • ryandv 3 hours ago

    I'm going to break the law right now and watch some illegally downloaded movies. MPAA RIAA FBI CIA NSA come at me

  • MangoToupe 3 hours ago

    If we had a thousand more people like him, maybe this world wouldn't be such a shitty place.

    • neilv 2 hours ago

      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.

  • colechristensen 2 hours ago

    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.

zozbot234 9 hours ago

[flagged]

  • hamdingers 9 hours ago

    That's every day.

    Today we do that, and eat turkey.

  • mettamage 9 hours ago

    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...

  • volkk 9 hours ago

    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

  • FullMetalBitch 8 hours ago

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

  • VWWHFSfQ 9 hours ago

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

    Nobody has anything to be proud of.

    • AlotOfReading 8 hours ago

      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.

      • VWWHFSfQ 8 hours ago

        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.

        • AlotOfReading 6 hours ago

          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.

    • macintux 8 hours ago

      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.