Of course HN is run by YC so there will always be the mod posts about startups and jobs, but it seems the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology.
Just a personal thought, would like to hear if others also have a similar perception.
"I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here"
That said, there is still a lot of that stuff. But the proportion of various topics have definitely shifted over the years.
I'm also concerned that the front page seems to prefer topics that only make sense in USA and especially California. For example I found following links posted today to be especially domestic:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806363 The Off-Grid Laws of Every State in America
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809517 Tesla’s Texas Move Is Latest Sign of California Losing Tech Grip
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812137 America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter
Yeah, you can still argue that they somehow gratifify someone's intellectual curiosity. For me they don't.
Now hacker news has become the exception.
There has always been a strong anti-authoritarian ethos to hacker culture, one where personal privacy and bodily autonomy and the right to encryption were intrinsically at odds with corporate and government attempts to control and surveil, and I hope that doesn't go away.
Well, yes, but usually from an aesthetic perspective, rather than a moralistic one. E.g. bad laws and cronyism being seen as ugly hacks and misfeatures on what could be a beautiful and elegant system of law; the cleverness of computer intrusion being more important than its consequences; the Internet (Tor, cryptocurrency, whatever) "routing around damage" — i.e. systems of law that seek to constrain behavior — and this being seen as "natural and inevitable" in the same way one might prescribe no moral agency to carnivorous animals killing their prey; etc.
Communities that start out full of hacker-aesthetes, seem to invariably shift to being full of engineer-moralists. HN wasn't purely a hacker-aesthete community when it started — it was tempered with a good number of other types of people — but they're certainly even more rare here now.
But I don't think that erases the presence of explicitly moral/ethical thoughts within the hacker community. The philosophical and political manifest in the hacker community in many forms: anarchic, communal, utopian, anti authority, anti centralization, pro equality and merit, etc.
For example: From The Hacker Manifesto
"... You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals...."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Manifesto
also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic
(I'm already playing with wrapping it so that probably isn't hard to add)
I have filtered a lot of politics on twitter by blocking prominent politicians and mute words.
That said I probably spend too much time here because of it.
I'd rather see a post about yet another JS framework honestly.
I agree with you, and I'm not asking anybody to pretend that anything doesn't exist. It's just that I would prefer that the "politics / culture / social / whatever" conversations happen somewhere else. But that's just me. I understand that not everyone will agree.
But still, for me, I'd much rather see "How I built a startup on Guile" than yet another story about how (Facebook|Instagram|TikTok|Twitter|Usenet|Gopher|UUCP|BBS's|whatever) are bad for our mental health. shrug
Even better, I'd like to see "How I wrote my own Guile interpreter in COBOL, added Java and Rebol interop, ported it to the Raspberry Pi, and interfaced it with my handbuilt analog computer, and then built a startup out of it."
It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers!
Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.
As I age I am less interested in business topics, and more interested in technological advancements
> Older people learn that, even if you have zero
> interest in politics, politics will still be done to you.
Eg: Most new things will be completely irrelevant in a couple of years.
For example, remember Cathie Wood? She's already forgotten. The "Facebook whistleblower" will be forgotten in about a month.
The commoners talk about people. The learned talk about things. The wise talk about ideas.
I have screenshot that I took a couple of years ago where the entire "Most discussed" section had the word "trump" in it. Every single one. That was the tipping point for me.
Maybe the site is larger now than it was a decade ago but it sure doesn't feel like it.
These days Microsoft kinda mellowed out (at least with regards to its attitude to open source and the non-MS dev community), and new tech giants came into the fray, but at least to me, the mix of news topics don't really seem that much different.
But (and I hope dang sees this) occasionally when HN "strays" away from tech it's absolutely brilliant. There's tons of discussion here on some health issues, diets, stuff like that, where I would never have found such good discussion (even the anecdotal evidence is interesting and useful) and where you can really walk away being better off from having read it. If that means tolerating the occasional thread about how appropriate politics is in the workplace, or how bad everything is for mental health, I'm more than happy to keep coming back here for that.
edit: by the way, I'd be quite interested in what a thread like this posted 8 years ago would look like. Wouldn't be surprised if people were saying this website was "going downhill" too back then. I think as long as the 12-18 only-cares-about-memes demographic stays on reddit, HN will stay just fine.
I've found the opposite. While there is enough knowledge about computing to keep the discussion informed and aligned with reality, outside that field we're mostly laymen. See the various UFO threads, the peculiar support for Wim Hof, the contentious COVID discussions... The health discussions in particular remind me a lot like the enthusiasm for polyphasic sleep 10-15 years ago, or the more recent enthusiasm for microdosing LSD.
N of 1, WHM helped me with a number of issues that I had thought were just going to be part of life. I don't think it deserves to be lumped in with "various UFO threads", or implied to be "unaligned with reality".
As for "contentious COVID discussion"; do you not remember when the lab leak theory was banned from Facebook and Twitter, for over a year, with millions of posts removed? This was one of the few places with morsels of quality discussion. The topic has much to be "contentious" about, that's not HN's fault.
The front page is the way it is because the regulars and the regular content have reached an equilibrium.
More so that we all don’t miss out on those new opportunities!
A social media site is only as good as its users and sadly the average person has a short attention span, poor reading comprehension and a preference for anecdote and feelings over data and substance.
The diet threads just make me roll my eyes and think "Californians will believe anything"!
(Sorry California, I know you don't all fit the stereotype.)
The funny thing is, no one thinks they are a part of this emergent 'hivemind' but the end result is the same.
HN is one of the few places on the internet where you can play devil's advocate and still live to see the top of the comments page because the number of people who read half sentences and instantly flag/downvote is very low. I think this is one of the biggest things setting it apart from Reddit.
But repeatedly saying that something is in decline doesn't mean that there is no decline. Also something can be in decline and still remain a fun place for a long time. Both can be true at the same time.
'Attacked from within' was pretty accurate, Kuro5hin eventually went that way too even if they were acutely aware of the problem:
https://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2009_3_12_33338_3000.htm...
This is of course a subjective view coming from my observations that I often learn new management/marketing terms that i shouldn't be learning, being constantly perplexed by the career ladders mentioned, and learning about tools that are useless to anyone but google.
Also don't forget the constant shilling about various paid services that are the second coming of christ until the next second coming.
At any time there are multiple articles about “obscure hacking” topics on the front page. Right now there are 10, by my count - though others may count fewer of course. But when I talk to hacker types about HN, they always comment on the cool obscure articles they find here.
All the content can’t always by obscure, can it? Surely if everything is obscure, nothing is.
In US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918
Which US state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370
Worldwide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647
https://imgur.com/a/xOAvftj for charts https://pastebin.com/77KGTfwe for data
They punish non-technical submissions.
I'm here probably 20% for the link, 80% for the discussion
We're moving up on the abstraction ladder, and as hacker news has always had an early adopter audience, focus is shifting here first.
Assuming these trends are highly correlated with the Kondratieff cycle, I expect a new trend to emerge about a decade from now. My best bet is focus will shift deep into the implementation again, but now in another context (Maybe on edge devices, data/code floating in the void, more decentralized, ...).
I've put my money where my mouth is, and my personal bet is on interactive 3D, as 3D capable devices are becoming more of a commodity and the current generation of youth (future buyers) will be a very technically literate audience that has grown up playing games and being connected 24/7.
Maybe I should send myself a reminder about this post in 10 years from now; curious to see what will have emerged by then on this site...
When problems are solved by three or more people working together in a Zoom meeting, "making technology" becomes a lot less like being a hacker.
And a lot more boring regular business suit stuff becomes part of the conversation.
That means the time is now! The changes and innovations that we are looking for are being formed right now! I can't wait to see what comes out of all this. Sure the HN community is getting a little homogenized but the creator of the next big thing is likely already here among us, and they're unknowingly depending on us to seed them with the concepts and values that we care about.
* openAIs text engine
* teslas driver assists
* serverless workers as ga in cloud
* container instances as ga in the cloud
* .net core, blazor?
* cloudflares infrastructural innovations
* next.js or whatever the latest framework is called (was it nuxt?)
* webassembly ga?
* rust ga?
Going from subreddit to subreddit where each one has its own community only breeds anonymous behaviour - toxicity. What you ultimately want to do is find the ~1k people that want to discuss the things that you want to discuss.
Why haven't we got a robust git server with anonymous read-only access for everyone who pays taxes that holds all (unclassified) legislation/regulation affecting society?
Commits would be possible for elected officials/appointees only.
Similarly transparent treatment for the tax code.
Come on, Hackers: let's beat the entropy out of (or at least minimize it) in the res publica.
Ultimately, the problem is that the "res publica" is not actually for the public. The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.
What does "meaningfully" mean, in this context?
But the res publica has NEVER been a democracy at any point.
What we have is a gnarly attempt to scale from the individual to the group, the singular to the plural, the integer to the list(integer).
Hence my comment: technically savvier people like those who visit this site badly need to give this res publica an enema.
So, roughly speaking, you have until another full page's worth of new comes in to get enough engagement to rank in the front two or three pages.
Also, obviously, it's better to post more of the kind of content you want to see, rather than complain about the content you don't like.
Also, remember that leaving a comment (even a thoughtful one) without also leaving an upvote acts as an implicit downvote and will eventually trigger the flamewar detector in a thread. It's entirely possible a lot of technical threads get sunk because they simply generate technical conversation but not enough kudos.
This happens if the post has at least 20 or 40 comments (I don't remember the number now). Most post in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest die with no of very few comments and upvotes, so most of the times it's not bad to add a comment to an obscure post. Sometimes a post is not good enough for upvoting, but it looks promising and the author may have some interesting insight.
Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping?
Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Something feels not right.
I follow HN on and off, usually just lurking, since 2017. But lately I’ve noticed a surprising amount of people humble bragging about their crypto wallets, their no-work-million-dollars startup, and how good their lives are since they left Facebook.
I'd much rather read about a startup's postmortem than about some monads-as-a-service library releasing version 14.374.299
Felt like that with articles about Rust as well
I know it feels this way but it was in fact a very long time ago. That was 2011-2012ish IIRC
2009-2012 was the time of post-jQuery, with a lot of discourse around better alternatives to that (e.g. underscore.js, backbone.js).
React was released in 2013, which sparked a lot of offshoots. Vue came in 2014, and Angular in 2016, which I would say is the earliest point where you could see a significant drop in the activity.
An article about Iran or Google is probably going to pull a big audience simply because it’s relevant to a wide audience of the readers here.
For a while, I was adding a reply to most of my posts where I pulled in a key bit of the article and maybe made a brief comment. I thought this would be a good way to encourage discussion, but I was advised it could also steer the discussion, so probably better to keep it to a minimum.
This I did, and while fewer posts gain critical mass without that condensation nucleus, it’s clear my best posts usually do end up going somewhere really interesting, and that the articles are definitely being read.
Discussion here is also still very high quality. I find it remarkable.
Any time someone hits out with a pun or whatever comment someone will say "this isn't reddit" and the comment is made hard to read - over time I have to imagine that has helped keep it from becoming reddit
Of course I am also burying the lede a bit. Paid and dedicated (I think?) moderators is an absolute key factor too
I just ran through the first 100 Front page times and there are barely any business related news.
I also dont see how the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology. Other than some rare news on another Unicorn, Public Listing, earning from FAANG. There has rarely been any business news on HN at all.
There are some economics news ( if you count them as business news ), but are again in the minorities.
YC backed start up Jobs are only shown may be once per day. They are more like ads on HN. Who is hiring is also only a monthly posting.
I am actually in flavour of more business news, but I also think the current balance seems to be fine.
Anecdotally, I would claim that there is a lot more non-tech content during the week, and mostly tech content on the weekends (see for yourself via the "past" link at the top).
So may be if you only ever go on HN during weekdays, the amount of business entries could be a little higher, but generally speaking I still believe HN aren't anywhere business focus at all. ( If it was I wouldn't have to rant about Supply Chain and Operation management every time the topic comes up )
Disappointing, for sure.
The shift in the last few decades is that hacking is now a thing that can result in becoming an accidental millionaire. That's going to have societal and cultural effects on the community, like it or not.
If you or anyone finds other things more intellectually interesting, you're very welcome to post more of them, or look for them in /newest and upvote more of them.
And I agree moderators are concerned with other things.
If you think we don't talk about hacking enough, then give us something to talk about
I'll come back and leave a comment on some of those. But by the time I do they may be a page or two deeper and not much makes the front page if they haven't already by that point. A later post on the same subject might make the front page though. I've seen that happen a lot here.
That said, there's still a lot here about "software, hardware, computer science". As far as "hacker culture" goes I'm not really sure what that is.
/show is currently capping out at only 41 entries, and /ask is 61. Looking at them both it seems the cut off is -48 hours. Extending this to 72 hours would be trivial and prevent older posts ageing off too quick - not everyone looks at those pages every day.
I'm hoping dang has this on his long list of to-do items!
Maybe I should check out slashdot again...
Would you disqualify Uber as a tech co, saying they're just a taxi co? Kinda same umbrella, imo.
Before you ignore me and pass on, I've been active here for enough years to remember when you could discuss just about anything and people almost gravitated to a contrarian opinion to figure out how someone could get such a different view. People now seem too quick to downvote with no comment, which in my opinion is a loss for anybody following up after that who is missing that context.
It is the conversational equivalent of the person who makes a forum question about an obscure bug that goes on for about 30 replies or so, and then at the end its just the intrepid OP showing up to say "thanks guys its fixed" and nobody has a clue what got fixed or how. To me, this is the laziest form of discourse, and I think it is worsened by people being too comfy in their peer groups and despite advocating for diversity, not valuing diversity of concepts and viewpoints.
If you or anyone wants to see more posts of type X, the best thing to do is to find interesting links of type X and submit them.
> I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here.
Feel free to upvote the articles that you enjoy. But forcing HN to only be about the above would probably lead to its demise.
There's a lot less to talk about because it's all much more boring, much more is already on tap and available, much of what hacking is done is boring as heck now, inside the bowels of vast enterprises.
The hacker spirit is in jeopardy.
Personally, I think the diversity of threads here is an asset. There was a front-page thread here on Ham Radio yesterday which I know nothing about but reading through the comments was fascinating!
Agree that sorting by /new and upvoting the content you like is hugely helpful.
I pointed this out very recently and got downvoted heavily.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479960
I still believe that if the thread above can make it to the top then introspection is needed.
Peace.
I've fulfilled my need for more technical discussions elsewhere for a while now.
One place I've liked is lobsters.
edit; I'll add that I've also started seeking out deep technical knowledge about a subject in the official places for the subject in question. For instance, for deep discussions on Kotlin I go for the KEEP and Slack channels.
Looking at the front page now, there are zero business news stories. At least 15 (half) are straight tech, and a further 8 are tech or science related. Of the remaining 6, one is about Covid-science, one is about tech-politics, one is about culture, one is a YC job listing, one is about HN 15 years ago and the last one is your complaining that there is not enough tech content here.
Sure there’s been a lot of content about Facebook scandals /outages this week, and maybe that’s what you’re focusing on.
But there is a “hide” button on each story, so you can always hide all the stuff that doesn’t interest you and just read the tech content, which always makes up more than half the items in the front page.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The biggest thing is just that after so many years here, there's very little new to discuss; most topics have been beaten to a bloody pulp, and you know what people are going to say before you even read the comments.
Another signal of this direction of things: last year's HackerNoon prizes were for the best (individual) contributors (and back then I managed to grab one of them). This year they were all about the best startups. Why should I spend a few days to put together a comprehensive technical article that eventually doesn't get enough eyeballs because the network is more interested in boosting visibility for (often well-paying) startups and VCs?
I understand that the IT biz side is also important and we need to follow what's going on that side too. The problem is that the IT biz side is cannibalizing everything else and there aren't many large platforms with deep technical content left.
I also understand why things are going in this direction - sponsors and VCs pay better than individual contributors, and by diluting the technical content one widens the potential audience. But it's not a healthy trend for the IT industry. The best ideas come when many technical minds meet and speak in the same place, not when the talk is all about the next unicorn to invest on or the next scandal in <put the name of humungous IT company here>.
In the meantime, I've moved my content to my private blog, and many other technical writers have been doing the same. Going back to private blogs because your content doesn't get enough visibility on large platforms feels like moving back the clock of innovation by at least two decades though, and it's not a good thing.
Engineering (which most programming is) is the economic application of scientific knowledge for human value/advantage.
Thus that implies several things:
• the core engineering is defined by economics, psychology, sociology, etc. at least 50% with technical/scientific knowledge/skills being the other 50%
• the money engineering generates is subject to human need and preference which is why the above liberal arts areas matter
• competitive value to the customer defines all projects, all hires and all salaries and decisions are only partially rational even with rational R&D, buying and selling processes
• factors that define the negotiation of value for price involve soft sciences which are messy but completely unavoidable. Those of us who "excel" in those areas have realized this and learned skills related.
• all of this is what "business" actually is!
• thus if you do software seriously, you also should be serious about business - this is analogous to Alan Kay's quote: "people who are serious about software should build their own hardware".
If you want "purity", become a scientist - nominally they don't care about anything but the purity/attainment of knowledge. But that alone does NOT pay well. That's why there are 200+ PhDs in physics waiting for each US tenured university position but companies doing engineering can't get enough and pay for that.
Science is only 100 years old as a profession. Engineering is many 1000s of years old because it has practical application which everyone else in society can easily agree to fund.
I think this may be a taxonomic problem. Consider this topic:
> Facebook's own data is not as conclusive about teens and mental health [1]
The article is about Facebook, so its definitely a business article. But it also an article on technology and society, and about the science that describes how social media consumption effects mental health.
HN would lose something if it focused purely on technology. While its essential to understand how technology works, and what changes are on the horizon, the beauty of HN is it also explores how science and technology interconnect with business, government, society, culture, etc.
Never understood the rejection.
PS: I have always read that it opens mind to other subjects. When I have enough time I agree, but when very busy I would favor some filtering to save precious time.
When you want make a technology you are fun like tech pioneers and when you want to the profit from a technology you are startup builder like PG, Musk, Gates, Bezos
Now there are so many ways to make money , startups, Fang salaries, crypto, so money kind of dominates the thoughts
I have a theory that the current generation will kind of rediscover hacker culture when they hit their 40s and 50s and become financially independent and are no longer motivated by money and there will be a big resurgence.
All I see lately is a lot of culture war, partisanship, 'intersectionality' and other things they were rarer before the Trump era.
I remember a time when people were getting downvoted for suggesting that maybe, Airbnb and Uber should follow local laws, fast forward 5 years and it's a cultural battlefield...
I miss the time when we were just yelling at each other over the use of singletons, or whether POST or PUT were idempotent...
There are occasionally helpful resources, all the same. There was a thread a few months back maybe of a list of different blog authors in various tech fields. If you want high-quality, informed, well-written news, you gotta curate it yourself.
Hacking doesn’t have to be breaking computer stuff, it can also be finding loopholes in business and everyday life and exploiting them.
There is no better ad that the one that seems to be organically showing up in your circle of interest.
This is how Reddit operates and I am sad to see it taking over Hn too.
Thank you for all the hard work
Without context, tech alone is a very sterile discussion.
5 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-10-09
10 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-09
15 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
A simple shell script will automate URL generation:
for i in {5..15..5} do
echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=$( date -d "$i years ago" +%Y-%m-%d )"
done
2006: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1167523200&dateRange=custom&...
As 2006 is partial, here's 2007 as well:
2007: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1199059200&dateRange=custom&...
2011: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1325203200&dateRange=custom&...
2016: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483142400&dateRange=custom&...
2021: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1640908800&dateRange=custom&...
As I read it, the top stories from 2007 were ... dominated by business / non-technical topics. Top 10 items:
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363)
262 points|pg|15 years ago|1566 comments
Finally, voting without refresh(http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#12jun07)
176 points|pg|14 years ago|42 comments
How Not to Die(http://paulgraham.com/die.html)
168 points|subhash|14 years ago|143 comments
Why we made this site(http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html)
165 points|pg|15 years ago|57 comments
Hacker News(http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)
150 points|pg|14 years ago|76 comments
Holding a program in one's head(http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html)
142 points|eposts|14 years ago|131 comments
Code's Worst Enemy(http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html)
125 points|mqt|14 years ago|41 comments
CMU professor gives his last lesson on life(http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07262/818671-85.stm)
121 points|amichail|14 years ago|33 comments
Why to Apply to YCombinator
113 points|palish|14 years ago|36 comments
Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
112 points|BitGeek|14 years ago|86 comments(It's a somewhat obscure reference)
not complaining at all about this, of course.