Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of content that would be #1 years ago before HN became about regurgitating news about acquisitions in Silicon Valley. Remember that it's Hacker News you're reading. I welcome a return to those days.

This is exactly what I want to see on HN. Exactly because I will never use Plan 9. It makes me happy to know that someone, somewhere, is using it. Providing an existence proof that even something this unwieldy and obscure is for one glorious moment useful in 2019.

Honestly, if you hate reading about obscure OSs and seeing how people tweak their UIs... I'm not sure why you are bothering to look at Hacker News. It's... right there in the name; if you don't want to read stuff that's targeted to hackers, maybe read something else.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

You probably should: the Guidelines outright note that the site isn't targeting something like 60% of the population, by the above.

> That this is the top story on HN currently is one of those things that makes me think I should just stop looking at HN.

Then maybe you really should. I'd much rather read about off-kilter operating systems and their fans that I would about yet another American centric political article or who got rich this week selling clicks to the highest bidder.

Its at the top of HN because its geeky and fun. For some of us this stuff is a hobby just as much as its a career.

> But the slice of humanity that finds this to be an appealing option is such a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total. How is this relevant to any vaguely reasonable person's life? Why would anyone upvote this Quixotic nonsense? Plan 9 may the be operating system analog of pumpkin pie, but what could it possibly matter given that it has zero ecosystem and zero uptake?

If you'd replace Plan 9 with Linux, this exact sentence could have been uttered in an equivalent forum anytime between 15 and 25 years ago.

If people won't use and promote great but unpopular stuff, things are never going to change, and we'll be stuck with the same crap we have today forever.

This kind of geeky stuff is exactly one of the fun parts of HN.

What are your top three most interesting stories on the front page? I'll upvote them for you.

One of the things I love about HN is how austere and information-dense the front page is. There are only two stories in the top ten I'm remotely interested in, and I figured that out in about as many seconds.

This is the Hacker News forum. Hackers are computer experts and enthusiasts that are interested in exploring the boundaries of computer technology or programming.

> stories about tiled window managers and/or Arch Linux and/or God knows what else are always showing up on HN.

Tiling window managers are a great tool that I use every day to optimize my work productivity. I like reading how others use them too, so I can learn new stuff from them.

This is one of those things that makes me wonder about synchronicity - was literally just browsing the Netflix queue and saw a title related to Plan 9 from Outer Space and it had me wondering about how Plan 9 was doing. Next glance at HN and whammo, right at the top - someone else was thinking about Plan 9.