2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
What I find strange is that Hacker News feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.
By using the Kevin Bacon-number idea: I can usually get within three degrees of separation of well-known technologists like Linus Torvalds, but I can’t seem to get within three steps of someone who confidently understands how HN works.
So I’m asking sincerely: Does anyone here feel they understand Hacker News? If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?
PS: This question comes from a mix of genuine curiosity and personal frustration. I’m honestly trying to understand how HN works in practice.
- This status page actually identified the outage: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ - Pages by Hund and Statuspal did not show the outage.
- The last post before the outage was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301823 (1:39:59 PM GMT). The last comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301848 (1:41:54 PM GMT).
- There was an average of ~4 seconds per comment just prior to the outage. Based on this, HN likely went down at 1:41:58 PM GMT.
Developer Blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/build-with-gemini-...
Model Card [pdf]: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-flash/
Gemini 3 Flash in Search AI mode: https://blog.google/products/search/google-ai-mode-update-ge...
Deepmind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/
The quirk is that it only allows you to fetch new articles once per day (or X days).
Why? Let me explain...
I want my internet content to be like a boring newspaper. You get it in the morning, and you read the whole thing while sipping your morning coffee, and then you're done! No more new information for today. No pings, no alerts, peace, quiet, zen, etc.
But with that, I needed it to be able to fetch all articles from my hundreds of feeds in one sitting. This is where Zig and curl optimisations come in. I tried to do all the tricks in the book. If I missed something, let me know!
First off, I'm using curl multi for the network layer. The cool thing is it automatically does HTTP/2 multiplexing, which means if your feeds are hosted on the same CDN it reuses the same connection. I've got it configured to handle 50 connections total with up to 6 per host, which seems to be the sweet spot before servers start getting suspicious. Also, conditional GETs. If a feed hasn't changed since last time, the server just says "Not Modified" and we bail immediately.
While curl is downloading feeds, I wouldn't want CPU just being idle so the moment curl finishes downloading a single feed, it fires a callback that immediately throws the XML into a worker thread pool for parsing. The main thread keeps managing all the network stuff while worker threads are chewing through XML in parallel. Zig's memory model is perfect for this. Each feed gets its own ArenaAllocator, which is basically a playground where you can allocate strings during parsing, then when we're done, we just nuke the entire arena in one go.
For parsing itself, I'm using libexpat because it doesn't load the entire XML into memory like a DOM parser would. This matters because some podcast feeds especially are like 10MB+ of XML. So with smart truncation we download the first few X mb's (configurable), scan backwards to find the last complete item tag, cut it there, and parse just that. Keeps memory usage sane even when feed sizes get massive.
And for the UI I just pipe everything to the system's "less" command. You get vim navigation, searching, and paging for free. Plus I'm using OSC 8 hyperlinks, so you can actually click links to open them on your browser. Zero TUI framework needed. I've also included OPML import/export and feed groups as additional features.
The result: content from hundreds of RSS feeds retrieved in matter of seconds, and peace of mind for the rest of the day.
The code is open source and MIT licensed. If you have ideas on how to make it even faster or better, comment below. Feature requests and other suggestions are also welcome, here or GitHub.