Ask HN: Why doesn't HN have a rec algorithm?

2/22/2026 at 6:15:54 AM

From the FAQ:

How are stories ranked?

The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

—-

Personally, I appreciate that the rankings are done at a site level, and there isn’t a bunch of tracking and manipulation to give me a personal “feed” to drive engagement. A lot of comments on this site complain about those practices on other sites. I don’t think it’s welcome here.

by al_borland

2/22/2026 at 8:25:39 AM

The idea is to discover new things you didn’t know you wanted to know - not consume more of the same

by A_Duck

2/23/2026 at 2:15:21 AM

Why can’t a recommendation engine do that?

by paulcole

2/22/2026 at 7:22:16 AM

It’s much better the way it is - one of the last remaining high quality feeds on the Internet!

(PS please feel free to disagree and post other ones I don’t know about below!)

by mrkpdl

2/22/2026 at 4:33:07 PM

I agree too.

by sujayk_33

2/22/2026 at 8:59:40 AM

How do you organize technical articles you read?

I read a lot of backend and architecture articles and often struggle to revisit them later.

I’m curious how others handle this.

Do you: Use Notion or Obsidian? Bookmark everything? Keep markdown notes? Rely on memory?

What has worked long-term for you?

What hasn’t?

by kamomkoian

2/22/2026 at 2:11:10 PM

A directory hierarchy works well for me. I've described my setup online before:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/173314/31143

https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/comments/p75xlu/how_i_o...

I don't read everything I have from start to finish. A lot of this is for future reference.

Since that StackExchange post, I'm now up to about 36.6K PDF files in 4.4K directories, with 14.5K symlinks so I can put files in multiple directories.

I also have a separate version controlled repo with notes a bunch of subjects. I'm planning to eventually merge my PDF hierarchy and the notes to have a unified system. It's going to have to be done in stages.

by btrettel

2/23/2026 at 2:13:42 AM

How many GB is your PDF collection? Have you considered sharing it more widely?

I know about Sci-Hub, Anna's Archive, etc., but I'm not so interested in a giant landfill containing all papers ever written. I'm much more interested in a curated collection of useful papers.

by kyboren

2/23/2026 at 3:53:02 AM

The root directory of the archive is 142 GB large. It's not only PDFs, but mostly PDFs. It includes many things that were never online and some things that were online at one point but are not online any longer.

For copyright reasons I can not share the entire thing as-is. I have plans to share most notes in there and bibliographic data for most directories. Doing so would be a major project in itself as this was never designed for that. I have some information I would prefer to keep private in there that's going to have to be filtered out, and I would prefer to clean some of it up to be in a more "presentable" state.

As for how useful you'd find it, I think that depends entirely on the overlap between my interests and yours.

You might be interested in this project of mine: https://github.com/btrettel/specialized-bibs

by btrettel

2/23/2026 at 6:28:47 AM

> As for how useful you'd find it, I think that depends entirely on the overlap between my interests and yours.

If that specialized-bibs repo is any indication, there seems to be reasonable overlap.

> For copyright reasons I can not share the entire thing as-is.

Of course. But if you'd like to store a non-encrypted backup copy on my system, I would be happy to offer my data storage services free of charge.

Alternatively: I'm training an LLM and it's transformative fair use.

My email is in my profile.

> I have some information I would prefer to keep private in there that's going to have to be filtered out, and I would prefer to clean some of it up to be in a more "presentable" state.

Totally understandable. If you ever get it into an acceptable state, please shoot me an email and I'll be happy to help out logistically.

by kyboren

2/23/2026 at 11:40:27 AM

That’s an impressive and thoughtfully structured system, especially at that scale. The use of symlinks and a separate version-controlled notes repository makes a lot of sense for long-term archival.

I’m curious — when working with such a large collection, how do you typically rediscover material or connect related ideas across different parts of the hierarchy? Do you rely primarily on directory structure, full-text search, or your notes as the main index?

And as you move toward merging the PDFs and notes into a unified system, do you see the notes becoming the central navigation layer, or will the directory structure remain primary?

by kamomkoian

2/22/2026 at 8:20:31 PM

Shared ranking beats personalized engagement loops.

by lyaocean

2/22/2026 at 7:11:44 PM

It's not meant to be addictive, even though it kinda is.

by chistev

2/22/2026 at 6:30:30 AM

Because it doesn't serve ads so the point is the content not the engagement.

by idontwantthis

2/23/2026 at 2:15:45 AM

The whole site is an ad…

by paulcole

2/22/2026 at 8:29:13 PM

Because it's a bare bones forum written in the early 2000s whose purpose was mostly to show off the author's bespoke LISP dialect.

I think dang mentioned one time having random stories bubble up to give them visibility and encourage variety and people hated it.

by krapp

2/23/2026 at 7:43:01 AM

Because shills will game the shit out of it. That is why.

by qsera

2/23/2026 at 12:06:17 AM

[dead]

by UqWBcuFx6NV4r