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by MontrealRaised 1768 days ago
Hacker news was originally written by Paul Graham in Arc. Arc is a Lisp-inspired programming language also written/invented by PG at the same time and Hacker News programmed in it to (also) prove it works. Arc did not catch on outside of Hacker News. Arc is free and open source. Regarding Hacker News, itself: "Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN? (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037

PG's response is:

I don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary anyway. The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content.
2 comments
markus_zhang 1768 days ago
I think it's pretty good. I only need one feature that is a piece of message that shows me which one of my comments has been replied when it happens. But then again I'm fine without it so I guess it's not necessary.
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amelius 1768 days ago
It's still missing modern privacy features, such as the "right to be forgotten".
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giancarlostoro 1768 days ago
If you email HN mods they are fairly reasonable is what I've heard.
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voidfunc 1768 days ago
The mods are awesome on here in general compared to many comparably sized communities.

Dang deserves a lot of praise. Thank you Dang.

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ReDeiPirati 1768 days ago
Strongly agree! A big shoutout to Scott also!
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dredmorbius 1767 days ago
Scott's not here, man.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26999696

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055115

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kjaftaedi 1768 days ago
Right to be forgotten is an old EU law, the new GDPR law is 'right to erasure'

In the event you don't feel like deleting your own comments the mods will likely help you.

A general best practice is to avoid posting personally identifiable information.

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farmerstan 1768 days ago
You can’t delete your comments after 2 hours.
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tomhoward 1768 days ago
You can have any problematic comments anonymised or removed by emailing the hn@yc address.

By default, it's an important part of HN that comments stay up, unless they will cause problems for the poster. PG explained why, many years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226

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