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 but also contains something a moderator would ask the author to drop: an insult or swipe at a person, a sneer, flamebait or an insinuation of bad faith. Bluntness, strong opinions, profanity aimed at things and harmless humor are not reasons to rewrite. The edit is as small as possible, usually just deleting the swipe; it keeps the author's position, confidence, facts, links and voice, and adds nothing.
• Remove it, if there's nothing to salvage: one-line jokes, "+1", pure snark, meta-complaints about voting. Removed comments stay in place as [removed]; click it to see the original and the reason.

The exact instructions the model gets are published on the prompts page.

While the demo was updating, new comments stayed hidden until they had 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.

A real example

Here is a small excerpt from a real front-page thread about AI finding software vulnerabilities, frozen as it ran through the mirror, with the reviewer's notes showing (its reason, a 0-10 score and tags for every comment). It works like any other page: click original on a rewritten comment or [removed] on a removed one, or switch to the side-by-side view.

What the reviewer did here:

• Sarcasm out, the claim kept. "Of course no vulnerability has ever been found by a human or by fuzzing" becomes the plain statement it was making, "Plenty of vulnerabilities have been found by humans and by fuzzing", and the second sentence is kept. The closing line accusing IEEE of shilling for "BigAI, NSA and any other entity with money or influence" is dropped.
• A jab cut, first-hand data kept. A reply opening with "You're joking right?" loses only that opener. Its substance, from someone who works on a 15-year-old public product that got over half its validated vulnerability reports in the last year, is kept word for word. (The reviewer also read "a place public software product" as a typo for "a large public software product".)
• A flamewar removed. "Who do you shill for?", a complaint about accounts that only post one-liners, and a reply calling that commenter a bot add nothing once the accusations are gone, so all three are removed.

How this was built (AI disclaimer)

This site was built almost entirely by AI. The author came up with the idea, set the goals and made the decisions, reviewing each version as it went. The work itself was done by a small team of Claude agents (Anthropic's Claude Code, running Claude Opus 5.5). That includes:

• all of the code: fetching from the HN API, the review pipeline, and generating these pages;
• the review prompts, which were tuned from the author's feedback on real threads and incorporate the HN guidelines;
• the HN-style layout, which an agent matched against screenshots in a headless browser;
• the writing on this page, the examples page and the prompts page, including picking the examples;
• registering the domain and setting up hosting, done by an agent operating the author's browser through a remote keyboard-and-video connection, with the author watching.

The comment reviews themselves are also AI: every keep, rewrite and remove decision is made by Claude Opus 5.5, with no human checking each one. Expect mistakes. The original of every comment is always one click away.

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.