Corrections and changes
Every fix and every change to how we count, with its date, newest first. To report a mistake, write to corrections@hackerapproved.com.
The log
14 entries. Quotes removed at their authors’ request: 0. How to remove yours
Mixed opinions got their own column. Each Hacker News account now counts once per product, in the column of its latest opinion: recommends, mixed, or warns against or regrets. Mixed feelings count toward neither side of the badge or the approval share. When a person's latest comment holds two different opinions of one product, that person counts as mixed (1,361 people). On the same data, counting mixed feelings as recommendations would badge 2,385 products; the new rule badges 1,837.
The counts now cover 12 full months, November 1, 2025 to October 31, 2026. They had covered 13 calendar months, the last with only two days of comments. The badge's months rule is now 4 of 12.
Every quote was checked against the comment it links to, paragraph by paragraph, and against the whole comment it replies to. 14,912 opinions whose quote was the parent comment's words and 3,265 whose quote was text the commenter was quoting no longer count. 9,530 quotes found in neither, or running across two paragraphs, were removed, with the opinions kept. Shown quotes are now cut from the comment itself, with its own spelling, case and punctuation, and 5,756 were cut to 25 words.
Comments Hacker News now marks dead (3,159) or deleted (1,413) no longer count.
Show HN and Launch HN submitters' own comments in their threads (10,552) no longer count, nor do comments in "What are you working on?" threads (4,863) or obituary threads (1,372). Opinions about a product in a thread that launches it no longer count either (27,950): a launch thread is a Show HN or Launch HN whose title opens with the product's name, names it anywhere while holding at least a fifth of its opinions, or is its largest thread with half or more of them. The wider rule took out pages built from their own launch, such as the mechanical Magic Keyboard.
The badge now also needs recommendations in at least 5 different threads, with no single thread supplying more than half of the people who recommend a product. Search engines now see a product page only when it has at least 10 recommenders, recommendations in at least 3 months, no thread supplying more than 80% of them, at least 2 reasons given in 2 or more comments each, and a summary written mostly from comments that still count.
Duplicate products were merged, so each person counts once (Go and Golang, SICP, 1984, Pi-hole, the Xteink X4 and X3, Tailscale Peer Relays into Tailscale and others), and 56 kinds of product were re-filed, including one ranking for coding agents. Retired and merged addresses now redirect to the page that replaced them.
Different products that share a name are now kept apart: 1,124 opinions moved off the wrong page by 111 rules on 69 names, among them the films of Dune, Frankenstein, Starship Troopers and Foundation, OCaml's dune build tool, Meta's Segment Anything Model under the sam editor, Proton Mail's company under Valve's Proton, the JavaScript Temporal API under the Temporal workflow engine and the Wire messenger under The Wire. 27 badges that rested partly on another product's opinions were lost, among them Frankenstein, Cosmos, The Box, VHS and the sam editor.
Health and money products (88 pages, among them prescription and over-the-counter drugs, supplements, medical devices, index funds and crypto) are no longer badged, offered to search engines or linked to a store. Each page says its opinions are not medical or financial advice. Bank accounts, payment apps and money transfers are not on the list.
Affiliate links now appear only on products that carry the badge; other products link to their maker with no tag. Where a badged product's maker sells directly, the maker's site comes first. Products that can't be bought new (vintage computers and consoles, discontinued models) have no Amazon link. Markdown pages, the API and the MCP server carry no affiliate tags.
Claude re-read all 80 quotes on the Amazon Kindle and Kobo e-reader pages against their comments: 11 opinions were relabeled or dropped and 2 quotes removed. Opinions about the Project Hail Mary film were split from the book. 14 Dune comments about the films or OCaml's dune were relabeled, and 3 comments from a review sample were corrected.
Claude rewrote 1,355 verdicts after the recount: those that no longer matched the counts, those with marketing words, and every verdict of a product with more critics than recommenders, which now leads with that and with what critics say. The quotes on each page are now picked in proportion to how many people recommend, have mixed feelings about and criticize it.
The counted opinions behind every page are now published at /api/labels.csv.gz (comment ID, product, stance, month and thread; no comment text or usernames).
After these changes: 8,827 product pages (from 11,370), 3,248 of them offered to search engines (from 5,275), and 1,837 with the badge (from 2,909).