HN Explorer

HN is my new Facebook

63 points by herve76 ↗ HN
I find myself not checking my Facebook feed as often as before. Instead I check the HN feed more and more everyday. Am I alone? Between VR, AI, Cryptos, etc, I love the technologies of today's world. Very exciting time ahead. Thanks HN.

48 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] thread
fadolf
same here, opens automatically.
slang800
Yeah, same here. Just don't start posting cat photos or what you ate today.
TurboHaskal
edit: tried pasting grumpy cat ascii art. Didn't work.
matthberg
I find that it's a near perfect niche for news. It's slim and dead-simple: there's one feed (two if you count new, then the subdivisions show and ask), no following or friends, direct messaging is even excluded. It was built into a niche, and it expanded to fill it perfectly.
marsRoverDev
This only works until it gets too popular. Reddit was pretty awesome back in the day too, specifically because it had an HN-like crowd.
kk_cz
reddit can be OK, you just have to invest time into finding subreddits relevant for you and unsubscribe from the defaults.
rhlala
Might be stupid but i never considered unsubscript from default/popular reddit, i will do it,

Anyway if i want fun/troll i can find it by looking the more pop posts overall, thank you

owebmaster
HN has some times when things get really "popular". But then it normalize after that. I guess it is here for enough time to survive.
pssst
This is my first post so here it goes:

I'm a 30 yo self-taught programmer from Romania and I've found this page a couple of months ago... since then this is my point of entry to the WWW, this is really adictive! :D

Great job maintining this!

zabana
HN sounds very similar to the FFF forum in Gibson's pattern recognition novel. And I mean it in a good way. Also, if it's not on Hacker News, then it's not news.
chippy
The FFF forum, to me, was similar to the Unfiction Forums - which was very active at the time the book was released, and both dealt with mysteries and puzzles of online phenomena - with found footage (for FFF) & Alternate Reality Games (Unfiction).

ARG players knew they were playing a game, but there is also a game and excitement about finding out whether an online mystery is actually a game or not.

COil
Same here. Facebook will just make you loose your time and fill your brain with useless data.
nicky0
I could say the same about HN...
gorkonsine
I couldn't. There's plenty of actually interesting and useful articles cited here, and then discussed (esp. if you're a programmer, but there's lots of non-programming topics discussed as well).

I can't say the same for Facebook. At best, you'll see cat photos and videos, which are OK, but not exactly intellectual, and I can get that stuff on Reddit's /r/aww anyway. More likely, you'll see a bunch of insane alt-right-wing "news" and memes and conspiracy theories passed around by your dumb relatives.

nicky0
There's a lot of potential for timewasting on procrastination on both HN and Facebook.
arximboldi
It is also like Facebook for me. Indeed, these are two first lines of my /etc/hosts and only comment them from time to time:

    127.0.0.1	news.ycombinator.com
    127.0.0.1	www.facebook.com
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parski
Pipe yourself to /dev/null.
dirtylowprofile
I just hope HN will have an official app in the near future.
Inconel
Out of curiosity, what do you find lacking in the third party HN apps? I use Materialistic on Android and find it to be pretty great.
passivepinetree
Agreed. When I switched to iOS, I bought MiniHack (paid, but well worth it) and I've been very satisfied.

In addition, it fits the HN ethos to only provide a dead simple website and an API and let the community do the rest.

chippy
I'm thinking that both Facebook and Twitter has lost that early adopter, frontier mindset that initially drew us to it. Reddit had it for a few years but has lost it now and HS has some of it in a niche way.

I think that there's a huge space, a huge potential for a new social network which we, early adopters, will jump in and love.

chinmayv
I use Block site plugin for chrome which redirects facebook to HN :D
mrnutella
I don't have Facebook. All the cool people are on HN.
lproven
Beware of echo-chambers.

http://n-gate.com/

ripexz
That's hilarious, is there a newsletter by any chance? I couldn't find one on the site.
clairity
gilfoyle, is that you?!

but seriously, hn is great as a daily news source. one person's echo chamber is another person's wisdom of the crowds. =)

Mz
Hackernews takes this claim seriously, and has opinions about it.

Delicious irony. Someone "hates" HN enough to spend all their time here and then write a send up of it every freakin week. It does not even appear to be monetized.

amorroxic
Been a HN user for 6+ years and after all these years HN is still pretty much the only feed I check on a daily basis. (not on Facebook so my example may not be very relevant)

The thing I love about the experience can be summed up as: - no click bait headlines - no endless "engagement", notifications, round navigation and noise (incredible quality of content curation) - amazing community (comments are often more insightful than the source)

Basically there comes a moment when you're up to date - reading done - and can carry on with life afterwards.

manoj_venkat92
I think wherever there's sizable amount of devs, engineers & creators are in a group. Things get pretty meta and discussions run deep in subject and quality. Good to be on HN. May people post really good tech and exciting world happenings and create a multicultural world-view among the users.

Like they say in Canada : "Peace Ooooot"

tnone
Strange, I'm absolutely jaded on the technologies of today's world. The web and mobile phones have locked us into a shitty content consuming culture. Almost nobody is writing real novel software, they're just gluing together premade parts and managing the plumbing. I don't even blame them, the amount of effort required to just get people to look at something that doesn't open with 1 click is immense.

But shunting data in and out of sql databases and making REST APIs is not novel tech work, it's just a very fragile way of describing and maintaining policy. The tech sites of old had more interesting and novel implementations in a handful of articles than passes through HN in a week, and it wasn't stuck behind a SaaS wall either.

As for VR or AI, one is stuck in a rut of uninspired arcade shovelware and the other is being used for terrifying totalitarian purposes. Welcome to cyberpunk dystopia, population you.

striking
> Almost nobody is writing real novel software, they're just gluing together premade parts and managing the plumbing.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

One man's "novel implementation" is another man's "unreadable and unmaintainable pile of hacks".

I'm not saying we should all standardize on a single set of tools, but after the fourth project you've cleaned up that spends tens of GB of RAM editing XML files, you'd probably wish "uses a database" was a business requirement for every future project too (just as an example).

increment_i
My own feeling is that we're now smack dab in the middle of two tech hype cycles, and yeah - it does seem kind of boring right now to be honest.

We've probably hit and passed peak web/app/social but the horizon technologies seem still very immature, with relatively high barriers to experimentation.

I've found this is reflected in my own experience perusing HN. In the past I found something on the first page almost every single day that blew my hair back. Now I'm mostly like "Oh, some ancient civilization used scorpion venom to make birthday cakes..." or "Oh, this React library hit version 8.5.2...guess I'll go...make a CRUD app now?"

I don't think my experience says anything about HN though - this community is as good as ever. I'm probably just getting old. One thing I know for sure is that there's a ton of opportunity out there for those with a prepared mind and enthusiasm for technology.

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angersock
You...do realize that all the news articles are basically product and startup propaganda, right?

Go read some n-gate to put things in perspective.

companyhen
I've been getting into Crypto a lot lately.
notadoc
I stopped using Facebook years ago and the quality of my life improved notably, I would highly recommend it based on my own experience. I personally found it to be a huge waste of time, and also full of useless information that amounts to brain pollution. Do you really care what an excoworker from an old job ate for breakfast? Do you really want to know a grade school classmates political opinions? Do you really want to see vacation photos of someone you sort of once knew? How much time, energy, brain power, do you devote to any of this? Does it give you any value in your life? Does it make you feel good? etc etc etc

You might think "oh but I like it to stay in touch with people!" but eh... pick up the phone and call someone, or send them a text message. Actually communicate with the people you want to keep in touch with. Casually observing what someone is doing via internet voyeurism is not staying in touch.