Hacker News Reader

Comment by FearNotDaniel | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: can anyone explain who this writer is, and why her posts keep hitting the front page so frequently these days? There's no bio on the site so I'm guessing there's some kind of Valley insider knowledge going on as to why her opinions are considered significant. Sorry if that's a dumb question, I just don't see the appeal of these musings and I'm wondering if I'm missing out on some crucial context, other than the fact that she's old enough to remember the 8-bit days.

View on HN

She was an engineer at Google, then a freelancer for a bit, then an engineer at facebook. Her debugging skills are otherworldly, and she is a decent writer, which helps her make Hacker News a lot.

She also has dealt with a lot of the social issues inside Silicon Valley, and has some pretty good insights there as well.

Perhaps 1/3 of her stories are cool "How the hell did she figure that out?" debugging stories. 1/3 are social commentary, and the remaining third are about odd bits of technology, like this post.

So good content gets upvoted.

I read them and upvote the ones I find interesting.

I like her posts and read/upvote them whenever I see them. It always seemed natural that they'd be on the front page of HN. It's the sort of content I'm here for.

Same for me. I like her writing stile and the content.

I think part of this is the 'frontpage echo effect'. Quite regularly there'll be a few days/weeks of articles about either a particular topic (that is not time-sensitive), a particular theme, or from a particular source.

Sometimes it's submissions of interesting links from the discussion of a previous article (I've done that more than once), sometimes it's from people who decide to read past entries from the same source (or add said source to their reading habits). And I'm sure there's other reasons why this happens.

That’s part of the charm of HN: scrolling through the top articles you’ll see brand new experimental software tool, a NYTimes piece about some world changing technology, then some rando engineer’s personal blog—right next to each other. Much more variety than the “top” search results elsewhere.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401293

Came here to ask the same thing. Thanks to to others in thread for providing some context. Personally I haven't found any of the posts from this site to be interesting/entertaining... but please link the ones people think are.

It's okay for you not to be interested in the kinds of things she writes about. Different hackers are interested in different things. But it turns out that a lot of hackers are interested in the things Rachel writes about, and we enjoy her plainspoken way of writing about them — confident without ever approaching being arrogant or condescending to the reader. (Sometimes they are pretty harsh on her previous coworkers.)

The HN search is the easiest way to find the most popular submissions of a certain site:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rachelbythebay.com&sort=byPopu...

Or you can click on the domain url from the frontpage (easier, though it doesn't sort by popularity so is less helpful in that regard for larger sites) - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rachelbythebay.com

She is a very insightful and technical writer. She's also seen a lot of current big business, and so she is the insider's outsider really.

I thoroughly enjoy her writing and every time it is posted to HN I read it.

I was ~literally~ about to create a post (when there were no comments) describing exactly this. But when I refreshed I saw your comment. I am wondering the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com