Ask HN: Why is there so little programming related content on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is there so little programming related content on HN?

Is the profession getting stale or boring?

As someone who browses here most days, it seems packed full of programming related content. Perhaps this is a matter of perspective dependent on your individual programming background?

Quick straw poll as of right now: 4 of the top 5 on the front page are programming related (the 5th is an Ars article about Donkey Kong).

Out of the entire front page 30, there's:

- 13 programming related,

- 5 about the use of software,

- 1 about an arcade game (also software, I guess)

- 2 about Google/Facebook as companies,

- 2 about physics,

- 1 about office space/working environments,

- 1 about stock options (an unusually low number for a YC news site),

- 1 about sewerage,

- 3 about the history of spoken language,

- and then this post.

Small nitpick: I'd relate "about office space/working environments," also to programming, because this is an important aspect of professional software development.

Yeah, and Trump's immigration policies impact the mood and even composition of your team, so that's also programming related.

IMO, there was big churn 1990-2015 in people's attitudes about the right way to develop software. This manifested in lots of discussion about languages, platforms, program architectures, hardware, etc.

Since I started reading HN around 2010, I perceive that interest in these topics has decreased. There has been convergence/compromise: some static typing probably good, favor pure functions, C pointers too risky, pay attention to object layout in memory, comfort with phone apps, etc.

I think we are entering a new era when people are going to focus more on advanced applications of technology. Using technology to communicate and store/retrieve data is no longer novel. IMO, HN still has a lot of content from the previous era that feels boring. It's programming content, but not cutting edge.

Edit: not saying there is nothing interesting left to do in systems fields, but the next challenges will be things like formal verification, making massively parallel stuff easy, distributed systems as language primitives, etc.

Edit2: HN also has lots of good content in the latter category, just wish it were a larger percentage of the mix :)

From my point of view, we are still firmly in the "software crisis" era. We can build software with limited functionality in a reasonable time, but we are not able to grow it without hitting various kinds of complexity ceilings fairly quickly. Plenty of today's software development is just a succession of painful choices on what to leave behind in just another rewrite.

Formal verification is a way to go, but given how people struggle with application of the most elementary usages of types, I am not optimistic.

I agree about the software crisis, I guess I think the solution will come from a tool set that is not yet (widely) known.

Formal verification and other protections resulting from strong static typing are less popular probably because of their delayed gratification effects - they're seen as unnecessarily constricting in small projects and their benefits are only seen as projects are grown and maintained over long periods of time, so it's difficult to justify their use early in the project when the decision is initially made.

I think that it's easier to justify rigor in traditional engineering projects (i.e. civil engineering) where project delivery dates are necessarily far off in the future - if you need to delay gratification anyway then you might as well adopt a more rigorous process. But in software engineering, where you can start delivering almost immediately, it's more difficult to get project owners and managers to see the value of rigor, especially if the project isn't yet known to have a long lifetime.

I think the products were better, at least in the era 2000-2010.

These days everything is bloated, slow to react, full of features that no one needs, spying on the user (product) etc.

Google peaked around 2004, Windows around 2008 (or earlier).

HN suffers the same problems that almost all voting-to-rank-submissions based social media websites suffer.

Namely, because each user gets one vote, having 100 users want to give your post 1 point is more valuable than having 10 users want to give your post 10 points.

As long as you've got enough technical depth that people will give you 1 point, it's appealing to a broad audience, not catering better to a core audience, that will get you to the front page.

Hence, there's no room on the HN front page for an article that turns a 9/10 Whatever user into a 10/10 Whatever user - only for articles turning a non-user into a 2/10 user, with little to interest a 9/10 user.

Very often this is true for books as well. There is way more market for a book which starts you on an application or language. But if you are very deeply into a topic, getting to the next level won't be a book. It'll be blog posts, Stackoverflow, blood, sweat and tears. I haven't bought a book since the 3rd ed of Chris Date: SQL and Relational Theory (but that's a very useful book!).

Do conference presentations/papers help people who are deeply into a topic? F2F with mentors? Would you pay for expert/advanced content development, e.g. crowdfund in your niche? Alternately, would you contribute expert-level content to a crowdfunded book?

I would absolutely pay, through the nose, for a good treatise on more advanced SQL techniques like (recursive) CTEs.

And also, I would contribute in depth Drupal topics, I already wrote two chapters of Bookzilla (aka. The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7) and also wrote countless articles in the nineties, I've been a columnist later an editor of the biggest computer monthly in Hungary.

Do you have thoughts about possible remedies for this? I believe that HN has a great voting structure compared to other similar sites (for example, Reddit); though there is, as you point out, obvious room for improvement.

Would a supplementary AI system help? Maybe a simple "random sprinkling" of New/Rising posts on the front page(s)? Or do you think there should be a completely new ranking system altogether?

Why is there so little programming related content on HN?

Most programming articles and blog posts have extremely limited appeal. They generally need to be on a platform you use, with a language you know, and about an algorithm or tool you might find useful. Things that get up voted on HN also need to be new(ish) and broadly appealing to a group of people who are also interested in startups.

Further exacerbating that effect: for any particular silo or specific language any one programmer deals with there is already one or more dedicated language specific news hubs.

Those articles aren't just competing for attention here in a broader sense, HN is also competing for that kind of attention against core community sites.

The submission guidelines recommend "Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

That's more than just programming and programming-related topics.

Has that really changed on HN? What was it like 5 or 10 years ago? Without that information, it's hard to tell if there is even a signal from which to draw an inference.

As a non professional coder (I'm a technical architect), I like the mixed balance of posts. If it were ALL articles about the latest programming frameworks and languages, I'd feel out of place pretty quickly :(

http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=2007-02-19

Next would be to gather statistics.

Here's one statistics. Fully 10 of the first 20 links have succumbed to linkrot.

A random fact, yet one that I still find really sad.

It's far too easy to believe that "research in history" would be so much easier in the internet age.

It's there, lots of it:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=programming&sort=byDate&prefix...

Seeing nothing but posts like 'Ten functional programming secrets' and 'Why this framework is the new React' would become boring fast (although these submissions are cyclical).

It's called Hacker News so what typically graces the front-page of this website is new content on topics that intersect with programming/technology. And I love it for that.

I completely agree, I got downvoted to hell in another thread for implying this but I think its true - HN has grown/jumped ths shark, it used to be startups people and devs and the content reflected it, now HN audience seems to be anyone in a slightly technical role or industry. There was a sweet spot for a while where we had a lot of stimulatingand diverse comversation about good topics but now I find too much noise in the feed.

If Im right (the HN admins will know by checking the user counts), maybe HN should split up unto subboards, have dedicated web dev or ML sections etc.

Complaints about HN's quality declining are practically as old as the site itself[0, 1], as is the mistaken belief that HN is intended to be exclusively about programming and technical content (leading to the mistaken conclusion that the presence of non-technical content is a sign of HN "turning into Reddit", which is common enough that there used to be an explicit rule about it[2].)

If you want to see better content, post better content, or put more effort into the quality of your comments.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781854

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198041

[2]https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HN turning into reddit

HN had a major Eternal September crisis in 2011, which was widely acknowledged by many users, and Paul Graham himself. It got to the point where he experimented with the gamification aspects of the site in a token attempt to slow the decline. Naturally, at the time, many folks also made comments similar to yours. That was 7 years ago. The good ol' HN is never coming back, at least not here, but that's no justification for denying it ever existed.

What do you mean no programming? Almost everything here is about programming https://i.imgur.com/8MqGba5.png

"Almost everything here" would be 9/21?

It's 11/21.

I found it..interesting that this very story isn't tagged as being about programming in the pic.

(disclosure: Gödel, Escher, Bach was the first book I really loved.)

More like "software is eating the world" - everything seems to be SW-related, drowning out content that's directly relevant to programming. OTOH, I've read many programming articles linked from HN in the past few days alone, so from my POV, there's only more other content, not less programming content.

would there be a way to filter out this content? I know HN doesn't want to be as fragment as reddit, but I guess many of us don't have the time to sift through huge piles of submissions each day.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hn%20filter&sort=byPopularity&...

I think this becomes true when any programming website becomes popular. Just look at reddit.

Highly technical programming articles can be hard to digest and don't appeal to a wide audience so they get less upvotes, especially if it's about a specialized language. If you really wanted to read those articles, you could still find them in abundance on other programming/hacking/specialized forums.

There was a noticeable drop in quality on HN after we started allowing political content. I think it's brought in a new crowd of HN users. I remember how in 2006 to 2010 Reddit changed from a place mostly frequented by programmers to a place filled with memes, trolling, and politics.

Edit: I generally hate the "the past was better" type of attitudes but I think in the case of HN and Reddit one just needs to look at the quality of 6 years ago to today.

Most of the content on HN appears to be about business, rather than about programming itself, or focuses on lucrative but technically-uninteresting corners of programming (like web design). This business focus makes sense, since HN is run by a VC firm and a lot of non-technical users who would like to run tech companies hang out here.

There's a related category: technically-uninteresting posts about technically-uninteresting projects that are essentially advertising for some small business. This is probably, again, related to HN being run by a VC firm.

(For context: I browse HN daily, but I never use the front page -- the values of the average HN user are far away from mine, so sorting by newest produces more interesting content. If you find the HN frontpage devoid of posts about programming, try sorting by newness rather than popularity, since technically-interesting stuff gets fewer upvotes here than wide-audience stuff about cryptocurrency or large corporations.)

I think you've somehow misunderstood the purpose of this website.

The guidelines here describe desired content as: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Aside from the fact that most of the content here is programming related, if it's not enough for you, your best course of action is to seek out actual programming forums.

Define 'boring'. Boring for me would be an homogeneous stream of code babble, possibly in mainstream languages that barely interest me.

Also worth noting that languages/ecosystems grow kind of slowly, HN couldn't be possibly entirely filled every day with quality programming content.

The act of programming itself is surprisingly hard to talk about in a way that isn't boring. There are some people that livestream it and I find this incomprehensible.

Programming languages are tremendously specific, have their own communities, and move slowly.

In the same way that architecture is more fun to talk about than bricklaying I imagine. One is open ended big picture stuff with interesting no real right answer, the other is the finer points of a specific implementation which depends on context.

Actual programming shop talk I normally reserve for work because it's going to be different for everyone and I want to think about fun stuff when I am not coding. It could still be about coding or what we can achieve with software, but the nitty gritty details of coding is just too context specific for general chatter and really works best between people working on similar projects.

Could some of the perception be because of time of day when reading HN? I feel there is some different content when I'm awake (EU), compared to next morning when US has been awake and voted on stuff.

Hackers aren't only interested in programming.

Perhaps you're referring to programming in the small. In which case reddit or a number of other websites would be more appropriate.

Programming really is simulating the world, through code. If you don't understand the world well enough you can't be a good programmer.

Which is why programming is largely meta-math.

This also happens to make programmers some of the most awesome people. You have to use various mental models to view the world in a way that help you simulate it.

So we have to talk and discuss about everything here.

Looking at the top ten just now, five of them are programming-related. (The others are social networking, UI, computer games, physics, and the London fatberg)

Of the next ten, another five are also programming-related. (The others are either business-related, about automation, or this post.)

So it looks rather like 50% of HN is programming-related. (From a tiny sample-size, admittedly.)

It's easier to "engage" with non-prog stuff when you're sitting 9h/d coding. Balance and diversity.

Not really what you're asking but I like lobste.rs for more tech-focus and less politics/startup/other related content. Posts are also tagged so it's easier to find something interesting.

Never heard of lobsters before. Thanks. I'm in the IRC channel hunting for an invite :)

Interesting,I have been asking myself something completely opposite to your question. Why is there so little of security news on HN.

I mean,I have nothing against using the word "hacker" to mean "someone who finds new and creative programming/CS solutions". But I find the obvious meaning of "someone who works for or against computer security" hard to avoid.

There is so much security news going around daily that I have to personally keep up with. I see little to none of that content on HN.

But I do quite often find useful programming and crypto articles,questions and discussions on here.

might be that the average hacker simply isn't interesting only in programming.

check 'show' tab for programming content

If you are looking for more hardcore programming stuff take a look at lobste.rs

I read it a fair bit. Can you or anyone here invite me there? Been here for 10 years, largely reading/talking dev topics for the most part, but just never known anyone personally with an account there to get me in there. Thx =)

Done. Check your email.

Niice, thank you!

Oooooooo! If you have a spare invite can you please send one to web@petercv.com ? :)

Are you joking?

The profession was always stale and boring once you become aware of the meta cycles and boom-busts of concepts and buzzwords.

Real new concepts are rare under the sun by now. New Problems, are usually old problems rediscovered by new Programmers.

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