Some of the best HN comments of all-time

In plain words

This is a curated collection of notable comments from Hacker News, gathered since 2016. It serves readers interested in thoughtful discussions and insights from the tech community. The project highlights outstanding contributions to conversations on the platform, making it easy to discover meaningful perspectives without scrolling through threads. It's useful for anyone seeking quality commentary on technology, startups, and programming topics.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

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  Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · ▲520

  Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.

• HN
  Hacker News Comments2012 · hncomments.nathancahill.com · ▲189
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  My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314

  Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

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  Analyzing top HN posts with language models2022 · ▲117

  Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…

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  HN Digest2023 · hndigest.substack.com · ▲81

  Daily digest of comments posted on Hacker News

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  Search HN for interesting comment sections2024 · searchhacker.news · ▲60

  I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…

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  SimCity, but with Permits▲936

  A free city-building game in your browser. You are the mayor. You know what the city needs. Now get it past the zoning board, the neighbors, the appeals court and the next election.

  Life & fun · 3d ago · permit.petercai.com

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  I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years▲778

  Life & fun · 16d ago · tanzaniaeducationproject.org

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  Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app▲728

  Turn a phone, tablet or TV into a sign. Type a message and it fills the screen: welcome signs, timers, Wi-Fi passwords and more. No app, no account, free.

  Life & fun · 16d ago · bigwords.page

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  Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard▲573

  Play a free virtual guitar online with your keyboard or by touch. Slow songs down and see every chord, string and strum. Acoustic, classic, electric and bass.

  Life & fun · 10d ago · guitoro.com

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  See *almost* any carriers phone settings▲432

  Carrier settings from iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy firmware, decoded and compared: APNs, VoLTE, 5G and Wi-Fi Calling per carrier, and what each build changed.

  Life & fun · 14d ago · carrierexplode.com

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  The whole Solar System and every tracked satellite, live in the browser▲407

  Life & fun · 24d ago · space.bl2.net

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  PhotoScan by Google▲1,219

  Photos from the past, meet scanner from the future

  AI · 2016 · blog.google

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  A visual guide to the most popular CSS properties▲1,117

  CSS Reference is a free visual guide to CSS. It features the most popular properties, and explains them with illustrated and animated examples.

  Life & fun · 2016 · cssreference.io

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  Netflix Offline▲1,067

  Watch Netflix anytime without an internet connection

  Life & fun · 2016 · help.netflix.com

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  Spark for Mac▲1,058

  Beautiful and intelligent email app

  Growth · 2016 · sparkmailapp.com

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  Primitive for macOS▲798

  Life & fun · 2016 · primitive.lol

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  A.I. Experiments by Google▲763

  Explore machine learning by playing w/ pics, music, and more

  AI · 2016 · labs.google