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Please don’t post sneering dismissals of imagined arguments on HN. We’re trying for curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Nope, I'll take my downvotes here.

I've seen WAY too much toxic condescension towards Africa in my lifetime; I'll continue to sneer as I see fit.


WTF? This is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. This style of commenting is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.


Dan and I are full time YC employees and other engineers at YC do plenty to keep HN running. HN’s software is continually developed to handle growth in traffic, along with abuse, spam, and (particularly recently) bots and generated content. The lack of new UI features is not due to lack of resources/investment but because it’s always been the HN way to maintain a minimalist design and for the content and discussions to be the primary feature.

I think the minimalist design is good. But hasn't the font size decreased over time in practice? When HN was first created, the average monitor had a much lower resolution, which made text appear larger. Now I think it's quite difficult to read compared to other websites. Obviously it's easily solved by zooming, but I think it would make sense to adjust for the change in resolutions over the years

"Minimalist" in 2026 is different than what it used to be in the '90s.

Of course, and part of my reason for being brought onto the team full time is to explore ways we can develop HN for the future. That doesn't mean that every 3rd-party HN project represents a feature that should be added to the core HN UI.

I didn't know, and I thought only @dang was working on HN. You must agree that at least some basic features, like a dark theme and indicators for new comments, could be easily handcrafted or implemented with coding agents!

Just do what Myspace did back in the day and turn an XSS bug into a "feature:" user themes!

Previously...

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 - May 2025 (3 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 - Nov 2023 (168 comments)

They're made out of meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 - July 2022 (151 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 - Oct 2020 (292 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 - June 2020 (4 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561522 - April 2016 (3 comments)

They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 - Jan 2015 (1 comment)

They're Made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 - Aug 2014 (170 comments)

They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098264 - July 2014 (1 comment)

"They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 - Feb 2012 (62 comments)

They're made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)


[flagged]


It's not a reproach at all! We do this all the time when something has appeared before on HN, so that people can look at older threads if they're interested. It's significant signal that a particular post has appeared repeatedly on HN over the nearly two decades we've existed. It's also interesting to see how the style of discussion about the topic may have changed over time.

It's already a feature (click the link domain).

That isn't always a simple, reliable way of finding the historical submissions of the article. Sometimes it's on a domain that has had many other submissions. Sometimes the domain has changed or the content appears in different forms in different places.

It's a longstanding convention to do this, and the audience appreciates it. Not sure why anyone would take issue with it.


It does appear a bit mechanical, like something the system would do. Maybe a submission should always automatically find all previous discussions as an automatic comment.

It's not a reproach, there are no negative words in the comment.

It's a gathering of information so that people can get more comments.




We've banned this account.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668579 and marked off-topic.


This is not an acceptable comment on HN. It breaks several guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't sneer on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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