minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

GitHub is home to over 36 million developers working together to host and review code, manage projects, and build software together.

Hacker News, a simple link aggregator owned and operated by Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, has had many positive effects on SV startups and engineers as a whole. On Hacker News, users receive Karma whenever another user upvotes a submission or comment they made, which incentives positive contributions to the community.

However, in maintaining its simplicity, many new features and behaviors added over the years on Hacker News are not fully documented other than the occasional comments from staff. This list details some of the hidden norms about Hacker News not otherwise covered in the Guidelines and the FAQ, along with a few bonus features outside of typical HN usage.

All comments start with a score of 1 point .

You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made.

A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored , but it can be again at which point it can't be re-vouched.

Moderators will sometimes rescue a post which didn't receive a lot of upvotes and reset the submission time on the post.

If you want to gather large amount of Hacker News data for data analysis/machine learning, you should use the Hacker News dataset on BigQuery, which is updated daily and is much more pragmatic to use than manually scraping data from the Hacker News API.

Original article