Happy New Year 2025

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Hacker News users rang in 2025 with New Year greetings from around the world, reflecting on how the site has become a daily habit, a career-shaping resource, and a rare example of high-signal, well-moderated online conversation. Many expressed gratitude for the community’s thoughtful culture and the work of its moderators, contrasted with the polarization and decline seen elsewhere on the web. True to form, the thread mixed earnest hopes for a better year—spanning personal growth, health, and global stability—with playful numerical trivia about 2025 as a “perfect square year” and lighthearted programming jokes.

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.