HN Explorer

Sign of the times?

16 points by cherenkov ↗ HN
I have been following posts on Hacker News, albeit, not religiously. I wish I had time to neatly categorize posts based on the content in the post but in general, a few themes standout: (1) sagely start-up wisdom (2) another day, another web application (3) another day, another debate about the best MVC framework for the web app (4) VC gossip (5) gossip around Apple, Google and Facebook (6) Another post about how language X sucks, a contrarian spinning his/her wheels on why language Y rocks. That pretty much sums up hacker news. The Signal/Crap ratio is scary if you rip apart fluff masquerading as technology.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the site. What bothers me is this penchant to appropriate the "start-up" cool as opposed to focusing on the idea, product, or service that is being innovated -- as if a start-up is the end-all-be-all in life. Is start-up association the technology community parallel to celebrities who are famous for being famous? That brings us to another abused word namely, "innovation." Since when did 100 lines of web application code become innovation? Where is the innovation that focuses on the hard problems? I am not sure if there can be a scale for innovation but a 100 line web 2.0 application is no match for the integrated circuit. I am sorry, I cannot put these two in the same league. As a developer myself, I can tell you, code is just code. Pasting code on blogs and sites is just show-off; much like the friendly sales guy in a suit who is flashing the latest smartphone at the airport to appropriate the phone's coolness.

What seems to be also missing is the appreciation for incremental and painstaking detail oriented innovation. There is joy in watching sustained growth in small increments. The satisfaction comes not from the magnitude of change but in nourishing the small yet subtle and perceivable increments that are part of the larger vision of a hard problem.

7 comments

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LeBlanc
If you want to change this then you and anyone who agrees should do the following:

    1. find and submit interesting stories to HN

    2. visit /newest often and upvote stories that aren't fluff
If you and all the other people who love HN do this, it will substantially improve the community.
canadaduane
I've recently been thinking about Steve Blank's characterization of start-up companies as essentially "searching" for a business model to "execute".

I think the reason so many noteworthy things not directly related to entrepreneurship pop up on yc news is that this "search" process uncovers unexpected things along the way. It's a kind of nexus for new thoughts and unusual twists.

Many of us engage in the entrepreneurial search process and at the same time co-opt it for other purposes. There is a lot of value in the overlap.

KevinMS
As a developer myself, I can tell you, code is just code. Pasting code on blogs and sites is just show-off; much like the friendly sales guy in a suit who is flashing the latest smartphone at the airport to appropriate the phone's coolness.

As a developer how can you say this? Code isn't just code, its good code or bad code. I cant count how how many good coding solutions to problems I've found on blogs, and how much time it has saved me.

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mathgladiator
> Since when did 100 lines of web application code become innovation?

When it makes executing and polishing the products easier.

> I am not sure if there can be a scale for innovation but a 100 line web 2.0 application is no match for the integrated circuit.

So, |EE| > |CS|?

100 lines of well written code in a functional programming language can do marvelously things. Just look at: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html and then tell me how connecting AND and OR gates compare intellectually?

> Where is the innovation that focuses on the hard problems?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850

> code is just code

Or education material so those that come after us skip 10% of our problems.

> Pasting code on blogs and sites is just show-off

Or marketing

> What seems to be also missing is the appreciation for incremental and painstaking detail oriented innovation.

In aggregate, you get to see the results of people's pain staking details in whatever form they market it as. A post may represent a good night of hacking or a year of research to produce one moment of clarity.