Hacker News
Grey text on beige, no images, and the best comment threads anywhere about how technical things actually work. Search covers twenty years.
Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.
How to get the most from it
Hacker News sits in Odd Search Engines under Learn, filed as rabbit hole.
- Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
- It works on a phone or a desktop, so open it on whatever is nearest.
- It works with the sound off, so it is fine on a train or in a quiet office.
- No account needed — you can start without signing up.
- Go in expecting something brainy.
About this category: Reverse image search, niche indexes, and search engines built on a premise other than popularity. What the web looks like when ranked differently.
Good for
- A long evening with nothing planned
- Giving your brain a workout
- A quiet break at your desk
- Killing time on your phone
- Trying it with zero commitment
Hacker News: quick answers
Is Hacker News free?
Yes. Hacker News is free to use and needs no account.
Do I need an account to use Hacker News?
No. You can use Hacker News without signing up for anything.
Does Hacker News work on a phone?
Yes. Hacker News works on phones as well as desktop browsers.
Is Hacker News safe for work?
Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.
How long does Hacker News take?
We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.
More in Odd Search Engines
All 17 in Odd Search EnginesFull-text search across every Hacker News story and comment, filterable by date and points. Find the thread where a famous project first appeared.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A link aggregator about computing that anyone can read: smaller, quieter and more carefully tagged than the big tech news sites.
- 10 min
- Desktop
An index deliberately built to favour text-heavy non-commercial pages. Ranking that punishes ad load instead of rewarding it.
- 10 min
Live map of which McDonald's ice cream machines are broken, built by repeatedly adding a sundae to a cart. Petty, rigorous, brilliant.
- <1 min
Same mood: brainy
All brainy sitesA weekly, hand-picked digest of the best Hacker News links, with an archive of past issues you can browse straight from the site.
One word of reassurance about the Large Hadron Collider, maintained since 2008 and still, reassuringly, saying no.
Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Football management one week at a time since 1997, with a transfer market and an economy run entirely by other managers.
- 1 hr+
Keep exploring
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Time and mood
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