From the guidelines "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Seems like hacker news becomes a news feed about tech and things that interest people. Not totally hacking but after some time, I just got hooked up to the trends that they post here.
Sorry for the off-topic comment, but this reminds me of a discussion I had on Slashdot where one old timer said something to the effect of "the editors were never good" and we were looking at the past through rose coloured glasses.
I don't know. I'm in the same position. I don't care about 99% of threads, I don't care about startups or other businesses of any kind, and I believe this site suffers from a particular brand of group think I don't associate with.
When there's any technical discussion that interest me, I believe 95% of participants don't have any idea what they are talking about, and 5% sort of know better but are wrong.
Yet I still come. I don't know why, it's like an obsession. I can't explain it.
Maybe for the occasional interesting link that appears every couple of days and I wouldn't have found it otherwise.
Actually, I never understood how promotion works here.
As an example, I submitted a website about a project of our own a couple months ago and got 4 points. Never made it past the "new" page.
A month later, someone else submitted exactly the same project and got 70 votes, getting to the front page and resulting in about 30.000 visits to our site.
Same content, different user.
So is this site about interesting content? Or about WHO submits this content?
Well indeed, but the exact same URL, only submitted one month later, should at least have reverted some karma on the user who submitted the project originally. Especially if the project was of his own creation...
I don't really see a difference between now and a year ago. Between nowadays and four years ago yes, maybe. But I don't recall HN being more tech-oriented one year ago than it is now.
Actually, this same complaint pops up like every two months at max and if it were true each time HN would be TechCrunch by now.
I've been lurking on HN now for more than 2years, and the change OP is referring about is totally true...
I don't care about boring news coming from TC/Mashable/... Now HN is only about:
-Facebook
-blogging shit
-why no women in IT ? bouhouhou we are all macho jerk.. common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here.
-"How Xcompany raised x$$, and why you should definitively not listen to these advices..."
-"Hey guys i'm a rich mofos working in IT AMA..."
1. Go back on reddit
2. Why so many Commercial/marketing bullshitters ?
Yeah because we have to talk about this every single day, and promote every single post about it...
Last months they were at least more than 2 post per day about this subject on HN frontpage.
This is not relevant anymore, and coming saying to us "IT guys" that we are all macho ass*, every single day is totally counter productive. And i don't know if you guys in the US are total douches but here in Europe we respect Womens @work
I'm European, and in Europe there is quite a bit of a problem as well. It's quite relevant, and if you aren't aware of why, you should educate yourself.
Also, maybe people wouldn't think you were a macho jerk if you didn't act like it. Hint: normal adults don't say things like "common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here". Boys trying to act macho do.
No, it's not becoming more and more. It always has, as I've shown in my post linking back to the Wayback Archive. You're all wearing rose-colored glasses.
You seem to have misunderstood. The point of the "Eternal September" is that the effect that used only to happen once a year started to happen all the time. It was once the case that the newbies and the clueless would flood UseNet in September, the start of the college year, asking the same questions over and over and over again. Then AOL gave internet access to everyone, and so the clueless weren't restricted to just September.
So the fact that this comes now, not in September, is an exemplar of the Eternal September, not an exception.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
On the other hand, I think there is at least 10% chance that this is a troll/joke though..
I think there is some merit to this observation.
The hacker definition have been stretched more and more, while the posts here still fall within the sites definition of news, there seems to have been a shift to a higher focus on hacking your startup X's round A|B|C|... and less about hacking the technology.
tl;dr: I think there have been a shift from hacking the technology to hacking the finance.
I'm not sure this is really a shift. This site was founded by a seed funding organization, so it shouldn't be a surprise to find lots of funding related stories here. It has always been like this as far as I can remember.
HN content driven by users. It's always evolving. There is no 1-person pushing the content, it's there because people want to read it. In 6 months whats popular maybe different again. Silly post!
Well, even with misunderstanding of hacking, still there is barely anything programming related on front page. HN looks like a "tech world news, and some other interesting stuff". Can't say if it was that different last year, wasn't following HN then. But currently it is reddit front page with lest cats and a little more tech news
There's nothing stopping the OP (or anyone) submitting and voting new topics that they like. Looking at his/her profile I see he's only submitted 3 threads & 0 comments. The community here is an active thing, and if you want to it to change, you really have to contribute to it.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadYet it was good enough to keep you coming back for four years?
Yet you are still here, reading and commenting...
Why?
When there's any technical discussion that interest me, I believe 95% of participants don't have any idea what they are talking about, and 5% sort of know better but are wrong.
Yet I still come. I don't know why, it's like an obsession. I can't explain it.
Maybe for the occasional interesting link that appears every couple of days and I wouldn't have found it otherwise.
Nah, it's not that.
People that are interested in pure hacking stuff already found better sources, like good subreddits.
As an example, I submitted a website about a project of our own a couple months ago and got 4 points. Never made it past the "new" page.
A month later, someone else submitted exactly the same project and got 70 votes, getting to the front page and resulting in about 30.000 visits to our site.
Same content, different user.
So is this site about interesting content? Or about WHO submits this content?
And different day, different time, different selection of users looking at /new.
I'm not saying there isn't favoritism (and I don't think that's necessarily bad), but there's also plenty of randomness involved.
You get about an hour on the first page of the new page. There need to be enough faces that are interested in your topic reading in that hour.
http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
Actually, this same complaint pops up like every two months at max and if it were true each time HN would be TechCrunch by now.
I don't care about boring news coming from TC/Mashable/... Now HN is only about:
-Facebook -blogging shit -why no women in IT ? bouhouhou we are all macho jerk.. common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here. -"How Xcompany raised x$$, and why you should definitively not listen to these advices..." -"Hey guys i'm a rich mofos working in IT AMA..."
1. Go back on reddit 2. Why so many Commercial/marketing bullshitters ?
If you are over 14, maybe the reason people care about misogyny in technology is folks such as yourself providing a good object lesson.
Last months they were at least more than 2 post per day about this subject on HN frontpage.
This is not relevant anymore, and coming saying to us "IT guys" that we are all macho ass*, every single day is totally counter productive. And i don't know if you guys in the US are total douches but here in Europe we respect Womens @work
Also, maybe people wouldn't think you were a macho jerk if you didn't act like it. Hint: normal adults don't say things like "common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here". Boys trying to act macho do.
This site is less about technology and more about how to make money from technology.
The various corporate movements of big tech companies is not 'Hacker subculture' and never was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
So the fact that this comes now, not in September, is an exemplar of the Eternal September, not an exception.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
On the other hand, I think there is at least 10% chance that this is a troll/joke though..
tl;dr: I think there have been a shift from hacking the technology to hacking the finance.
MySpace, Facebook, Delicious, Yahoo, TechStars, Y Combinator, if anything they were even more than now.
I'd rather have finance hacking (I was thinking bitcoin) than yet another article on the NSA.