Update: This page was not recently discussed on Hackers News so unfortunately I cannot provide the discussion link.

This page lists idiotic phrases repeated in Hacker News (HN) comments. It’s a kind of a nasty counterpart to the 4chan terminology4chan terminology page which highlights things about 4chan’s culture that I feel are underappreciated. Compared to 4chan, on Hacker News the discussion contents are often more educational, but the “culture” is rather bad in a way that focuses on virtue signaling, trying to appear smart, and weird worship of money and status.

The list

Genuine question / Genuinely curious

Silly and unnecessary prefix to actually asking their question.

“quote”, —, …

These are examples of special characters that take some know-how to type and use correctly, and as such are a way to flex your intellect. Therfore they are much more common on HN than elsewhere. I must admit that I use these even more than the average HN user.

The first two are fancy (read “correct”) ways of writing quotes in some languages. The way normal people write quotes they type the “symmetric” quote character " on both sides of the quoted text. The way fancy people like me write quotes is to use “ for the opening and ” for the closing quote. In some languages the left quote character is the low „.

The em dash character — is the punctuation your literature teacher wants you to use instead of the wrong dash - character.

The proper ellipsis is a single character … . In most situations it’s visually indistinguishable from three consecutive period characters ... . But for example with monospace fonts the difference is often obvious, the periods taking three times as much space. Using the special ellipsis character also prevents you from the embarrasing mistake of typing two or four periods instead of three.

Recently it is known that AI models easily use these characters properly, so it has been adopted as a crude AI writing detection to look for em dash characters and declare that no real person would have bothered to produce such a character intentionally.

f*ck

Can you fucking imagine adult people voluntarily censoring themselves by typing out “f*ck” instead of fuck? Not at all uncommon on HN.

hug of death

HN users like to be smug about how mediocre web apps crush under load when posted on the forum. I guess framing it as a “hug” is to indicate positive feedback which is the norm, instead of say, constructive feedback.

shadowban

HN sometimes uses this “unusual and cruel” form of punishment where the banned user is not prevented from posting on the site but instead tricked into thinking that no one is interested in their posts.

When a “shadowbanned” user posts the other users cannot see their posts at all, whereas on the poster’s own UI it shows their posts in the expected chronology. Only if they would log out and look at the thread anonymously would they realize their posts are not really there.

Since this is such a clever form of punishment, HN users are exceedingly proud of it. Obviously there is no way they could themselves ever be banned and all who did get banned most certainly deserved it.

Black line of death

Whenever any person with any relation to history of computing dies, there is a congratulatory thread where everyone praises this person and their achievements, even though most had never heard of the person before. The mods set up this silly black line to be displayed on the top of the main page.

/s

I kind pseudo (HTML) “tag”, written out explicitly to signify the end of “sarcasm”, which ironically destroys all the rhetoric effectiveness of actual sarcastic writing.

PG

Short for Paul GrahamPaul Graham, creator of the site.

Turns out

Possibly my own bias, but after reading https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out I now see this all the time in HN comments.

Hard disagree

This is just one example, but the writing on HN can be extremely verbose. Every post is a mini blog post basically. So a post might start with “Hard disagree.” followed by the core opposing idea, and the three paragraphs of detailed arguing. Such writing style would be good if you knew in advance the person to be trustworthy, but given that most of the posts are crap (like on any forum), I’d rather prefer them be brief instead of comprehensive.

meditation

Most of HN posters seem to have a hard-on on meditation, always helpfully suggesting it to any ailment or even spiritual discovery. Not even exaggerating, HN makes coffee seem like a hard drug and it’s not uncommon to see posts about how a person managed to conquer their coffee “addiction”.

this is called

Whenever a user recognizes othersd discussing something related to a thing they learned recently, they were proudly start to explain how there is actually a name for this phenomena. They will often include a Wikipedia link.

burying the lede

Kind of related to the previous, lots of users are very eager to demonstrate they know this phrase, and in particular that you are supposed to write it with the word “lede”, and not “lead”. The meaning is simply that a news story should normally bring up its main point (lede) right in the beginning, and failing to do that causes it to be “buried”.

previous discussion

When a link has been posted on the site before that someone recognizes, they do a search of the site and then make a post linking to all the previous discussions, possibly in order to “be helpful”, but I think usually just to point out they know it’s been discussed multiple times, which is quite childish.

The title is wrong

Whenever a link title to a post is even slightly misleading, someone is sure to point that out and request it to be changed. Often they try to sneak in their own opinions. For example recently there was a link to a startup blog post about how “an AI agent deleted our production database”, and one HN comment insisted it should have been title “I deleted our production database by using an AI agent”.

dang

“dang” is the username of an overly helpful moderator of HN. He often posts the above kind of link lists to previous discussions.

brand posters

This is a name I just came up to describe a phenomenon which is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan “avatarfagging”. On 4chan it’s considered extremely rude to post non-anonymously by somehow making other recognize your posts, for details see 4chan tripcode4chan tripcode.

But HN being a “business” site, they somehow think “marketing” and “branding” are also good things in social environment. Users often proudly make comments to point out that the post they replied to was written by a “special person”, even when the person did not care for such special treatment (some people quite famous in tech circles post on HN occasionally, and that’s indeed one of the good parts of the site, but really you should judge the posts by their content, not who wrote them).

So by “brand poster” I mean a person who is trying to make a name out of themselves, having bought into the whole “hustling” idea. For example any time a new AI model is released by one of the big labs, which is about twice a month, there is this user “simonw” (https://simonwillison.net) who will always post in the thread about how well that particular model fared in his arbitrary AI ability test to “draw pelican riding a bicycle”. I often skim these threads and every damn time there is the pelican post by simonw. I think that guy may actually had some good writings about AIs on his blog but for me he is now eternally “the pelican guy” that I cannot take seriously.

There are many other posters I recognize on HN just by the content of their posts, which is quite sad (the usernames are quite easy to not read and there aren’t user images that you could instantly recognize).

until you have kids

HN posters will never fail to mention they have kids, and how their “priorities have shifted” and if it weren’t for that they would probably be famous CEOs or something like that. It’s just that they chose this humble path or bearing the immense responsibility of raising a child or two, properly shielding them from each an every danger of the modern world such as smartphones and social media, and to guide them towards perfect moral behavior.

SO

Short for “significant other”, similarly used to brag about not being bachelor.

ye olde catchphrases

Many of the utterances on HN have the chracteristic that they signal the poster’s intellect by making some cool reference. Especially, posts that use templates such as the following often get a lot of upvotes that signal they got the reference:

• The unreasonable effectiveness of
• or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
• is all you need
• Hitchhikers guide to
• is dead, long live !

laws and rules

Forget “Occam’s razor” and “Murphy’s law”, everybody knows those! To prove your vast knowledge, consider if you could instead sneak into your post one of these terms often used on HN:

• Hanlon’s razor
• Peter principle
• Parkinson’s law
• Streisand effect
• Pareto principle
• Sturgeon’s law

when the music stops

One phrase to convey that the writer “knows” how something is going to happen, usually by drawing attention to some supposedly similar historical example. Instead of discussing possibility of a stock market bubble, the HN post writes “when the bubble bursts”.

canary

Short for “canary in a coal mine”, meaning an “early warning sign of danger”.

The

Arguing tactic where you start with phrase like “The problem with X is that…” or “The reason they…” in order to give the impression that the writer has the full picture and is able to conclusively explain the situation.