HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is "Hacker News" misleading?

5 points by bronxbomber92 ↗ HN
This question was spurred by my thoughts on another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498000). As I continued writing my post to that thread, I realized my thoughts were increasingly leading me to a different topic.

I started reading HN last spring. As a newcomer, I had a hard time understanding exactly what HN was trying to be. When I came here, I was hoping to find more technical content (programming related) and less fluff than I was finding at reddit. This was preconception was largely due to the impression I got from boths friends who recommended HN and from HN's name itself. However, that's now what I found, which was disappointing. I found instead a variety of content that's more "Steve Jobs"-esque, meaning the content posted is often focused on the interface between the real world and technological world (as Steve Jobs would say, where liberal arts meets technology). This was very far from what I expected HN to be. I love HN for what it is, now that I know what it is, but I think "Hacker News" is largely misleading/misrepresentative and attracts a different audience than what HN intends (or has become - I'm not sure).

For the most part, most tech content posted seems to be web-related (a somewhat fitting stereotype would be "ruby hackers"), or not actually technical at all (for example, from the frontpage now: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/02/ideas-bank/nice-guys).

There is nothing "hacker" in nature in most of the content posted here. There's nothing wrong with that; the name is just misleading (in my opinion).

So I am wondering, does anyone agree with me? I may be totally off or have a strange interpretation of the word "hacker." Either way, I'd like to know what you think!

5 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 20.5 ms ] thread
pg
See the first paragraph: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bronxbomber92
>> "Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

That leaves to one's own interpretation of what a hacker may be. "Hacker" has a lot of different connotations, which lead to ambiguity. The ambiguity of hacker renders that statement not very useful.

>> "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

That's extremely broad and certainly not representative of what "a hacker" might be interested in, no?

derekja
I run a hackerspace in Victoria, BC. We went through the whole multiple definitions thing with that as well and finally settled on "makerspace" as our identity because of negative connotations of the word hacker within the non-tech community.

Within the tech community I view hacker as an entirely positive term, though, and one that seems to fit this community fairly well. Sure, only a portion of the stories are technical in nature, but even the ones that are not are generally about some interesting underlying aspect of business, culture, etc. And that's what hacker implies to me - power through understanding of underlying structure and cause.

I'm pretty new to the community, but glad to have found it!

bronxbomber92
I agree, I too am glad to have found HN :)

To me, a hacker is much more technical in nature. Reverse Engineering, Assembly, homebrew, etc. are all keywords that come to mind when I think Hacker. The "programmer in his/her dark basement" is a decent stereotype to describe what a hacker meant to be when I first found HN.

Your definition of Hacker is equally valid though! I don't think there is an accepted definition for the word, which makes the name all the more misrepresentative to the portion of the population that has a differing definition of Hacker than the HN community/culture.

chc
Your definition of the word "hacker" is unnecessarily limiting. Try reading pg's "Hackers and Painters" to get a better idea of the meaning that I think is most common here. (In a nutshell, it's closer to "maker" than the "hardcore nerd" definition you espouse.) At any rate, I don't think the name is meant to be strictly normative — it was originally called "Startup News."