Hacker News Reader

Really good points. IMO the web-surfing crowd's taste for news (as opposed to their capability when it comes to work) is deceiving. Their excitement for prospective high-leverage information creates a demand that biases community sites like HN and Reddit toward novelty, and the result is this massive FOMO loop: "Read it, remember to try it, forget to try it, aw damn a new thing already came out and it's better because X! Read it..." I love that the author of the article really speaks to this situation.

I have a relative who got really into this mindset. In fact he picked the "HN's Choice" software framework of the day for one of our co-creative projects a couple years ago. Mostly a fun project, but it could have gone somewhere, maybe. He got as far as setting it up so that we had some scaffolding, then basically he flamed out. I don't blame him at all; he'd never even used it before and expected himself to be able to just run with it. And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P, but he was ashamed to use it. It made me so upset to see him feel all this pressure and then collapse.

Personally I feel that pressure myself sometimes but being aware of it helps a lot. As a hobby side project, I decided to go back and do some 1990s MS-DOS programming and experiencing this FOMO stuff was part of the motivation. I needed to be free to work deep instead of thinking broad, so to speak.

themodelplumber says> "And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P...

Prolog?

What a shame he couldn't use his best language! It has such nice web frameworks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages#...

I imagine you're joking? More likely Perl, it was a big web language back in the day. Smaller chance that it was Pascal.

Actually php is more likely than either of those.

Good points here. Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. PG and his cofounders invented the web app, using a combination of old tech (lisp) and new (the internet).

There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem.

“How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter.

Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.

Oh, for christ's sake. I don't want to get all "get off my lawn" but HN is full of early-20-somethings rediscovering things and calling them 'bleeding edge'.

The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.

A good example of this is static typing - shat on for years by HN, and now, all of a sudden it's the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today.

The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive...

Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.

These are the kind of comments that make HN so special: knowledgeable and insightful, due to deep experience with the past and critical understanding of the present. It isn’t just a rush to what is shiny and new, but is capable of identifying what is novel and valuable, and is articulate enough to explain why.

Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.

I never realised how highly some people praise hackernews comments lol

Hackernews has an _instagram filter_ where everybody brags about how smart they are.

Then there's a bunch of fresh grads who fanboy their favourite tech companies.

Then every so often you get a gem of a comment from knowledge leader in the industry.

But that's quickly overshadowed by 'my Startup, my Startup, mah Startup' and how everybody wants to be rich one day.

But like every larger community in the internet, it eventually derives itself into an echo chamber.

Current-day HN strikes me as very similar to early 00s Slashdot, albeit more self-serious and with an ideology more informed by SV capitalism/entrepreneurialism than the convoluted politics of open source software.

Agreed. The article that opened my eyes to this shows (IMO) a serious deficiency in C#'s type system compared to F#'s, which includes the concept of tagged-union types. It shows a very simple shopping cart program that can't be modeled cleanly in c# without using the visitor pattern....which is difficult to read IMO.

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csha...

Hacker News ranks at #959 in the US. It didn’t get that rank from just being geared toward startups with Tier 1 engineers.

Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general.

HN’s front page 10 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10

HN’s front page 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10

We’re both making points based off anecdotal experience, so who knows. I have been a reader for the last 7 or 8 years, but my experience is just one subjective data-point.

Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.

You don’t have to use anecdotal experience. You can use the same link format for any day that Hacker News existed and see the same thing.

HN archives are stored in BigQuery, so it would be possible to do an analysis that was more rigorous than a human reading the thousands of front pages to see a pattern of difference.

> Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers.

Or engineers who've convinced themselves that they're Tier 1 engineers...

You are assuming "tier 1 engineers" are also the ones using the bleeding edge technologies. This is not true in my experience. The best developers care a lot about using the best tools available for a particular task - which is very different from using the newest tools avaialbe. In reality it typically takes a long time for a tool to become mature enough for productive use, at which point it is not cutting edge anymore.

In case of open source, everyone wants someone to (beta) test their solutions in production. Only after few years of that such testing a tech product becomes usable for the rest of the industry and thats when it becomes profitable.

Im not surprised the leaders of IT, ppl who create those new technologies, push for a narrative to use those new shiny things.

Are we reading same HN? It seams majority of people advocate fairly sane proven choices for majority of projects e.g. start with the monolith default to PostgreSQL for dbms etc.

There's a pretty big difference between what the people on HN would have you believe and what the articles on HN would have you believe.

You've never seen disdain for Java on HN?

Somewhat but I think it's more a reflection of sentiment towards anything Oracle related.

> provides little concrete value to the business

The concrete value doing such things add to our business is happy staff (which you mentioned), which means the best people don't leave, and stat excited and productive for the long term. Also, when hiring, because it helps us get the best people to join us in the first place.

It's not just about "bleeding edge", it's about giving dev teams the freedom to do that if they want to. Some do more than others, but the point is, if they get it wrong, things break and they get called at the weekend or whatever and they soon change track.

The costs of doing such things include...

1. Half-done projects started by some happy staff who then went on to start the next project in the next shiny new thing and either more-or-less completed by someone who was just about capable of cut-n-pasting without understanding or who decided that some new shiny thing needed to be added to make the rest wonderful.

2. A monstrous stack of projects in 637 different programming languages, frameworks, ideologies, coding styles, and indentation levels, guaranteed to require rewriting for any change. Result: 638 different things.

I always hear people warn about these things, but haven't seen it in practice at all, as long as those who write the systems are also responsible for operating them and not subjected to inappropriate external interference.

Of course, letting someone write whatever and then move on and leave it to someone else is a problem, but that's a problem regardless of whether they used bleeding edge tech or not.

For example, I've personally seen more tech-debt sins in more traditional monolithic Java + rdbms applications than I have an any of the Go based micro-services + nosql/etc I've seen over the years. I'm not trying to prove that "bleeding edge" is therefore better because it's not. I'm saying it's irrelevant.

The problem of leaving behind unmaintainable crap isn't about the tech, it's about the management, the team processes, the prioritisation process etc.

"Move Judiciously And Reuse Things" vs "Move Fast And Break Things"

(There may be some overlap)