It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.

One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…

Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.

How lucky are we that our contributions here warrant two fine moderators?

I just read Tom's brief story on how he arrived here and what it means and felt... I don't really have a quick word for it.

I know I am better for having spent time here.

Oh, I got it! A tiny bit spoiled, but in the best of ways. Yeah, that is what I felt.

How lucky we are indeed. :)

Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!

I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.

Then we can continue confusing the beginnings of comments that appeal to authority as interjections.

It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.

I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!

Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.

Best wishes.

I laughed at this phrasing. Welcome tomhow!

Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently won't stop growing

I thought that sctb was another one? No longer I guess?

I want to say Congrats but moderating HN must have been a painful job.

So I guess enjoy, have fun and see you around. :)

Thanks (in arrears and advance) for all the work here; this is the best forum on the Internet, and we owe much of it to you guys.

Anywho, welcome tomhow.

I'm long time lurker on hn. Excited to see you as mod.

On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.

But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.

At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.

It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.

Good luck and thanks!

Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.

Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal / previous account or it will ruin it? :)

Thanks for keeping the standards so high here!

My bad.

WA here, hehe. Congrats!

Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect you failed on this one @dang.

And B: Just curious, what was dang's old longname?

Thanks for putting up with the work - let's go!

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...

It’s good to see MGR (Moderator Geographic Redundancy) being implemented on HN ;-)

Using RAID as an analogy, we now have RAID 1 moderators so let’s hope to have RAID 6 soon :-P

Ok ok, enough with the silly tech jokes and the smiley’s.

I will post this every year on moderator day as a sign of respect for this place. http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg

it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole. I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably the most interesting question of all.

how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.

may the odds ever be in your favour!

Just out of curiosity, are you and dang payed for caring for this forum? It seems to me it requires a lot of time and dedication.

Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some reason ...

/s

Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253

Just trying to understand the algo...

One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.

Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.

Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.

For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.

My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.