Happy New Year 2025

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Community appreciation & role of HN

  • Many participants describe HN as a daily habit or “home page,” often for a decade or more.
  • Several credit the community with shaping their careers, studies, and worldview.
  • HN is contrasted positively with other social platforms: high signal, little infinite scroll, “least guilt-ridden procrastination,” and unusually high discussion quality.
  • There is repeated gratitude toward the moderators and their empathetic, active style, with one linking a New Yorker article about their work.
  • Some note a migration path over the years (e.g., from Slashdot/Digg/Reddit to HN) and say HN is now their main or only news source.

Global greetings & multilingual flavor

  • New Year wishes come from around the globe: US (various time zones), UK, Europe, Asia (including China, Singapore, Japan), Australia, the Middle East, and more.
  • Many greetings are shared in languages/scripts besides English (e.g., several Indian languages, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Telugu, Kannada, Polish, Maltese, Portuguese, Malayalam), sometimes with playful corrections or expansions.

Time, calendars, and numerology of 2025

  • Multiple comments explore mathematical curiosities:
    • 2025 = 45², = (20+25)², = 9²·5², equals both the square of 1+…+9 and the sum of 1³+…+9³, sum of first 45 odd numbers, base-20 palindrome, Harshad number, and more.
    • Some meta-discuss which identities are “cheating” (derivable from others) and how such properties are found.
    • Historical perfect-square years are linked to major political and social shifts, with optimistic speculation about 2035.
  • Others note ISO 8601 rollover, Unix/hex timestamps, “0x37 years since epoch,” and the 2038 problem.
  • A few prefer solstice-based or “natural cycle” new years over the Gregorian date.

Coding jokes & hacker culture

  • Playful snippets show ++year, React state updates, jQuery DOM mutations, infinite loop { year += 1; }, and “year of the desktop OS” jokes.
  • References to classic HN lore (e.g., famous threads, Dropbox/Putnam stories) appear.

Hopes, worries, and resolutions for 2025

  • Common wishes: peace, less polarization, personal growth, better health, meaningful work, and more kindness and love.
  • Some mention specific goals: learning to cook, adopting “yearly themes,” learning OCaml, writing more, working on fusion energy, cutting back on alcohol/weed.
  • A few darker or skeptical notes: reading pessimistic history/forecasting, joking about extinction-level events, concern about AI singularity arriving too soon.
  • There’s explicit appreciation for “real people” conversations, curiosity about whether such communities can become more common, and inclusive New Year wishes extended even to bots and animals.