What is this?

Curious Hacker News is an unofficial, experimental mirror of the Hacker News front page. It is not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator. It asks a simple question: what would HN threads read like if every comment followed the guidelines by assuming good faith and gratifying intellectual curiosity?

How it works

Stories and comments are read from the public HN API and kept up to date as comments are posted, edited and deleted. An AI model (Claude Opus 5.5, by Anthropic) reviews each comment and does one of three things:

• Keep it word for word, if it's substantive and in good faith. Most comments are kept.
• Rewrite it, if it makes a real point wrapped in snark, sarcasm, name-calling, ideological sweep or bad-faith framing. The rewrite keeps the author's position, facts and links, and either explains the point or asks the genuine question underneath. It invents nothing.
• Remove it, if there's nothing to salvage: one-line jokes, "+1", pure snark, meta-complaints about voting.

New comments are hidden until they've been reviewed, usually within a minute or two.

Pseudonyms

A rewritten comment is no longer the author's own words, so it is shown under a pseudonym (such as amber_heron42) instead of their HN username. The same user always gets the same pseudonym. Click original on any rewritten comment to see what was actually posted, and by whom, or open the side-by-side view to compare a whole thread with the original.

Votes and replies

The vote arrows are only there to make the page feel familiar; they do nothing. To vote or reply, use the real thread on Hacker News, linked from every page.