Urban Dictionary on Hacker News (2013)
urbandictionary.com
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Netflix has never been an aspirational overlord type company like the others.
Even though Microsoft is no longer at its peak, its dual presence via OS and cloud keep it in sustainable wannabe overlord position.
As far as acronyms, I like FAAAM (replace Google with Alphabet).
But their #1 stranglehold position in tech went bye bye when they dropped the ball in the OS area by whiffing fantastically several times as mobile rose to dominance.
In cloud they are significant, just not dominant either.
But as a cash cow they are still a king.
A business willingly choosing to make less money and get out competed by competitors? Why did they then attempt to create a windows phone then pull it after failure?
These were colossal failures. The fact that they were such a cash generating machine doesn’t imply that they didn’t lose out on being a much bigger business.
They didn’t step back from mobile prominence, they stepped back from repeated mobile failures, licked their wounds, and refocused on other areas because they had lost their chance.
And they knew it.
Of course, every day is a new opportunity. Microsoft seems to be far better managed now.
They still have a tight stranglehold on desktop computing.
Some times I stumble upon really old HN threads in Google searches and end up missing the quality of old HN discourse. It was never perfect, of course. Nor is the modern version without upsides, as there are often good pieces of wisdom if you sift through enough noise in the comments.
However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts. It’s also starting to feel weirdly disconnected from reality in the way that the extremes of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have become echo chambers after consuming non-stop bad news. It’s like people read so many outrage tech stories here that they forget there is an upside to the tech industry.
Big Tech hangs in a weird balance where we’re simultaneously supposed to hate and distrust FAANG companies but also at the same time we’re told to seek out FAANG jobs where we can maximize compensation.
The key to enjoying HN is to ignore any thread remotely related to politics, FAANG, social media, economics (where the comments are actually just about politics), drugs, or open-source drama.
Sadly, the most interesting content links (great blog posts, writings, knowledge, new projects, and so on) generally get fewer upvotes than outrage topics. I try to make a point of actively upvoting the content I want to see here every time I visit.
The cynicism and optimism seems to have stayed more or less constant. The quality of conversation is the problem.
Luckily, quality tends to bubble to the top, barring manual intervention that occasionally makes a few (few) mistakes. So far.
The extremes are true: I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years. I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, and it deserves a substantive eloquence beyond my capabilities at the moment.
HN's political discourse has been quite unpleasant since last couple of years. Used to be quite a gamut of perspectives, now it is completely lopsided.
I quite like the 'what are you doing this weekend threads' it feels very small-community-like. [But that might just be that I've often felt a lack of tech community - as an example, I've used Linux for >20 years and don't have anyone in my life I could have a conversation about it with like you might chat to a neighbour/friend about pruning a tree or fixing your car.]
Here we totally disagree.
Before people used to be banned without explanation, some views would be downvoted heavily etc.
Today it is better: there is even room for republican voices as long as they are reasonable.
And yes, I've been here over a decade.
"I think we're less"
"I'd say it's the same"
It should be pretty straightforward to actually figure this out by sampling posts from different HN "eras" and doing sentiment analysis.
What's the standard practice for sentiment analysis these days?
> I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years.
Well, I don’t think that is surprising given the rise of popularity of HN. The early days had people interested in startups, and hence their virtues, and later came a large crowd that had some interest in tech but had random alignments.
I feel that human beliefs form a distribution where almost anything will believed by someone, and if you gather a large enough crowd you can find a large cohort that will earnestly believe various nonsense things.
To start with a tech-focused example: there used to be at least a sizeable minority in favour of GPL licensing, vs. MIT, and people on both sides of the issue had at least some familiarity with it. Today, I see comments where people seem unable to even grasp the idea that anyone would consider the GPL.
Since it's difficult to believe someone would actually forget so much on an issue of importance to them, I believe it's changing audiences rather than the initial audience getting older. Or, alternatively, the tech sector simply expanding by several orders of magnitude, and any people who have been in it being drowned out.
This is somewhat noticeable on issues of social justice: all the major tech companies still have policies to promote participation by groups that were traditionally marginalised. But you wouldn't expect that from the comments here, Gamergate would still be filed in the ethics-in-journalism-dept', if that joke had survived.
It's tame in that people will opine that women are too stupid for IT, but they will do so very politely.
HN moderators are very proud of being accused at roughly equal rates from both of the US political tribes. That's the sort of triangulation leading to false balance even local journalists have managed to pick up over the last decade, where they still exist.
I'd really prefer if they flipped a coin and grew a spine. Is George Soros eating babies or not? Answering that question with a shrug isn't neutrality. For anyone in a position of even minor power over the discourse, it's dereliction of duty.
Practically, it means that any even barely political question on HN is discussed on a level where I could write both sides of the discourse in my sleep. If it's SF housing it's going to be "you don't want homeless people around where you life if you have children" vs. "you do know not all homeless people are violent, right?".
In the process, everyone retreats to their corners. The "virus lab leak" idea, in its first incarnation, was not something I'd be willing to explore, because allowing any possibility of it would immediately be weaponised by people pushing the idea that it was an intentional release of a biological weapon, an idea with completely different ramifications that was, nonetheless, superficially similar and closely linked.
Any tread on COVID is 90% fighting over "it's just the flu" (very beginning), then hydroxywhatever, and lately ivermectinopleasedont. In that regard, I truly doubt the comments are representative of even the readership of HN, let alone the US public, and even less the world's public.
Opinion on "mainstream media" is probably the most out-of-wack compared to opinions generally voiced in polite company. It's enough for a story to be published by the NYT to get a dozen comments often not even arguing that, but assuming everyone agrees with, the idea that everything they write is a lie. This may be an outcrop of the single uniting characteristic of commenters: they love to be contrarian. So much so, on this issue they all agree. "Actually", they tell each other with the mannerisms of a big truth being revealed, "I am much too smart to believe what everyone is believing". And if that means water isn't wet, so be it.
I dunno, I think the current atmosphere is more closely aligned with the zeitgeist of society writ large than it was previously.
That famed entrepreneurial optimism was born of a belief that technology is inherently good, and that startups can change the world.
The veil has been lifted and we see that most startups, internet startups in particular, exist to provide lucrative exits for the owners while abusing their users by harvesting data and selling ads.
The promise of a tech-led utopia is a hollow farce. It's a facade for the surveillance dystopia that big Internet companies are creating.
With every iteration, user experience takes a back seat to developer convenience, and devices are more powerful yet feel sluggish because of the mountains of shitty abstraction layers piled on. The companies that wield inordinate power are giant faceless corporations acting with impunity and whose decisions have no recourse.
Being a tech user is an exercise in frustration. The world sucks and Tech is making it worse.
The bubbles of optimistic outliers are the places that affect society writ large. That's where to be.
These companies come across here every day. If you think everything is about selling user data you aren’t paying attention.
It's hard to conjecture this, let alone prove it, but a strawman take I feel like is adversarial foreign powers have influenced the social media outrage narratives to destroy the western spirit from inside out. HN is reflecting larger trends. Western spirit was about putting behind differences and doubling down on cooperation. Looking back, from post-WWII to now, I get goosebumps and feel sad that this is what we've become.
Nothing has changed in terms of good vs. evil of technology. Fundamentals are still the same. Not even space exploration has escaped HN's cynicism. It's time for me to move onto some other place.
Bingo, and I wish more people would realize this. “soviet demoralization” or “ Yuri Bezmenov” for more info.
Maybe in the movies, but certainly not in real life.
When did this ever happen?
Tech has its bad apples, but overall, it's been a huge boost, not only to productivity, but quality of life for everyone.
Just because people are idiots and get off on raging on social media has nothing to do with the tech. "But the algorithms!" Nonsense. People were raging on message boards well before the algorithms, we're just seeing what happens when the internet is expanded to the general public and it's not just nerds arguing over tabs vs spaces or which semiconductor company makes the best processors.
UX has continued to improve year after year, just because your favorite app went to shit says nothing about the industry at large. I can't think of a single example of software that was better in the past vs now.
But go ahead, disconnect from tech, and see what the world was like before it.
Stop using the technological wonder that is Google Maps. Stop using Netflix with its stupendous ability to stream great quality video and audio on a connection that has no business handling it. Don't take advantage of Amazon's same day delivery on an obscure item that you would never find locally. Don't consume the billions of hours of educational videos on YouTube covering any topic you can think of. Give up the ability to connect and stay in touch with any person anywhere via the multitude of social media apps. Give up the ability to know what's happening on the other side of the world, as it's happening. Give up the ability to search for anything you can think of, and find multiple sources of information.
I mean, the improvements in every single industry have been massive due to tech. Anything from ordering food to launching rockets into space has been greatly improved by tech.
Tech has introduced new problems that we must address, but to complain that it hasn't brought forward some utopia you have in your mind, is just unfair.
Big tech has created some undeniable conveniences, and it provides an endless stream of content that entertains you as it distracts you, as you describe, but if you think that's worth the major problems the consolidation of its power has caused, you're a fool. If you haven't encountered any of the myriad ways in which this, like any consolidation of unaccountable power, is harming people, then you live in a very lucky and ever-shrinking bubble. But perhaps you have, and simply decided that this was the tradeoff for the shiny toys listed.
Maybe humanity will always live in a cycle of worshiping new unaccountable power bases for the scraps they feed them, until the dystopia they create becomes too horrible to bear, and some awful upheaval has to happen to upset it. Maybe this time the combination of surveillance technology and near-total capture of both retail and information sources, is too powerful and this can't be reversed. Maybe the planet will be uninhabitable by the time it can happen.
Isn't that a direct reflection of the current state of the tech world? Since the 00's, it has morphed from a rather hacker-friendly, digital far-west into a locked-down plutocracy dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations, whose end-goal are quite often to squeeze every single last bit of personal information or other valuable commodity they can out of, typically, misinformed users.
E.g., despite all the folklore, I feel much better toward 00's ‶Linux is cancer″ MS and their Windows 2000 than toward 2020's ‶We <3 Linux″ MS that just spy on me through Windows 10 and put ads in my start menu.
Similarly, I prefer the 90's ‶we're making expensive and original computers″ Apple to the 2020's ‶we will scan all the photos on your device″ Apple.
And it's not to single these two out, they're just the first examples I'm thinking of. All in all, I just believe the whole digital world is much more hostile now than it used to be, which would, at least partially, account for the growing apathy, cynicism and defiance in the community – it's hard to feel any different when every other week brings a new personal data leak, spyware scandal or privacy-infringement affair, be it corporate- or state-sponsored.
It's difficult to not feel resentful.
What HNers often complain about is companies that run "cargo cult" start ups, pretend to be "family" but only one way.
I've been here since at least 2009 according to ny profile.
The entire industry back then was so much more optimistic.
Personally, I only browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
I don't mind this description at all (there's a freedom in giving up even just the dream of the hustle).
Thread archive: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317
When I read the history of 4chan[0] years ago, this story in particular stuck out to me (as being hilarious).
>February 21 - Two discussion boards are added, hosted on 0ch: /amh/ (Anime-Manga-Hentai) and /bbs/ (4chan Discussion). The next day, Censored Vagina makes a newspost announcing that the cost of running 4chan for the rest of 2004 added up to $2,200 and that the money would be needed in donations. The links on 4chan are reflected to link to 4chan.org instead of 4chan.net so that users will not need to write 4chan.org's IP into their hosts file.
>March 1 - moot announces that the site will not be able to continue because the March server bill is too large to pay and that more donations will be required to pay it or 4chan will die. He makes one final request for donations and hopes for the best. According to a news post image about the original /q/, /q/ - Questions was added this day.
>March 8 - After a week-long swarm of donations, moot announces that not only does he have enough money to pay the March bill, but that enough money was donated to keep the site running into 2005. moot thanks all donators and posters and announces that he is currently in "Cancun, Mexico".
I don't doubt there are interesting discussions to be had there (it is filled with nerds after all) but the userbase is very clear about who is welcome there.
They're also virulently antisemitic.
The culture of 4chan is also self-deprecating, why don't you rise up against that too and say that it's bullying against young un-successful males that can't get girls to stand within 10m distance of them?
Snapchat for your production data.
They're belligerently racist to keep non-racists away? If so, why not just say they're racist and leave it at that?
* I’m not a 4chan user
That page is actually pretty funny here and there.
I just came from the “EFF writes a letter to Tim Cook about CSAM” article. I guess we’ve confirmed the parody.
I mean...
> Additionally, the following words MAY NOT be used in variable or function names: master, slave, he, him, his.
Prescient.
> A place unknown to financially successful entrepreneurs.
I always thought the bulk of HN was not entrepreneurs but employed engineers, curious minds, etc. Have I been deluded all this time?
In practice it tends to be mostly content from bored engineers. Any social website like HN is inherently biased toward people with the most time to burn, because they have the most time to post. It turns out a lot of modern engineering jobs have a lot of free time at your desk in front of a computer, so those are the people who post here most.
The actual entrepreneurs are usually too busy to post too much on HN so they aren’t heavily represented. Not absent, of course, but it’s hard to compete with the people who seem to have infinite free time for social discussions.
HN can be interesting, but it’s really difficult at times to separate the signal from the noise. There’s a lot of noise.
That's because YC founders fled to Bookface many years ago, YC's internal Hacker News.
A YC founder once saw me browsing HN and said "Huh, are you on Bookface?"
I realized later that he'd never been to HN.
No, I meant Bookface, YC's internal clone of Hacker News.
I think this is because most of the people here are living in California and they seem to have a very particular world view not always compatible or even undertandable for anyone from any other place.
I used to enjoy this website in like, 2015/16 i think, now the topics are not even tech related anymore.
SV's political culture (and largely America's culture) is being exported to the world at an ever increasing pace: https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...
Edit: Of course downvotes!
The valley's culture has little in common the the rest of America's. It "exporting" its culture to the rest of the US as much as it is anywhere else, though I'd personally characterize it more as imperialism than exporting.
From a purely technical standpoint, HN remains the best forum for discovery of new projects and giving feedback to FAANG. (M not so much).
HN has always had a mix of topics. That hasn't changed.
This is a vote-driven website, and while maybe less prone to the bandwagon effects on, say, reddit, it still happens that if a group of people begin to vote up a post or comment, it will have strong momentum to gain further votes.
I've seen you post this verbatim comment before and it always feels a little like a shallow dismissal.
Maybe its worth someone taking the HN Kaggle dataset and doing a keyword analysis. Demographics are one thing, the topics themselves should be studied.
I'd love to know.
I will get banned if i talk more.
I'd like to know what is non-comprehensible. I am an independent - not "right" of "left", and I think that I can understand both sides. And I think that both sides can understand each other, but they just disagree on what the other side wants to do. But that is not the same as incomprehensible.
So, without getting into a political rant, what do you calmly and objectively, with no wrath attached, do you think is incomprehensible to others who don't live in California. And, by the way, I live in California and 100% guarantee you that there's a wide spectrum of people here. Had one guy a few months ago that I was trying to do business with say that if we meet, he doesn't wear a mask. I've talked to a lot of people in California who don't accept evolution and think that the earth was created 6,000 years ago.
And, you talk a place like Texas, supposedly hard red state, but you go to places like Austin, and Austin voted something like 70% for Biden.... I just looked it up just now, and was right - 71% https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/texas/
So I think before Texas and Missouri and all the rest of the red states get their hate on about California, they should first go into all their own blue areas. And, pretty much, the blue areas are mostly university towns. The kids. So, all the red states should start putting all their children who are college students at University of Texas or University of Iowa and all the other university towns into gas chambers or whatever they want to do. Start the hate at home, I always say. Fix one's own home. Kill the kids. Even in harder hard-core states like Mississippi, there are a bunch of counties were at 70% Biden. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/mississippi-... Why bother about California? And, of course, there is a boatload of counties in California that voted 70% for Trump https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/california/
So. What specifically are these things that are incomprehensible to others, that californians do, supposedly. Give me specifics.
To be frank, work is work and I don't care so much to read about it. I care even less about drama at other companies.
Upvote anything with Rust, Go, SQLite, or Haskell in the title; use the words “orthogonal” and “Pareto” as much as possible.
Hate SPAs, Docker, crypto, and someone using the word “crypto” for cryptocurrency.
That damn Oracle Conspiracy, and OOP !
False. We could have had Smalltalk.
Twitter: A rabid pack of shrieking, pitchfork wielding neo-Marxist SJWs ruining people's lives with impunity.
Facebook: their boomer Neo-Nazi anti-vaxxer parents captured by CIA mind-control and agitprop.
Youtube: nothing but low-effort monetized clickbait and also leftist propaganda, because Google.
Instagram: also nothing but low-effort monetized clickbait, but also porn.
Tiktok: CCP propaganda but also for some reason we really like it, at least until the novelty wears off.
Reddit: just mouth-breathing imbeciles posting cat pictures and memes. Good thing we're better than them, and point out that fact to ourselves at every opportunity.
The entire rest of the web: shit, except for 4chan.
Movies: shit.
TV: shit.
Music: shit.
TFA: never bothered reading it, but I'll assume this rant about cultural marxism is relevant.
Books: Do they even still make physical books? I thought paper went obsolete in 2019.
Science: lies, damn lies and statistics.
Media: lies, damn lies and more lies.
Other people: hell.
Emoji: BLIND RAGE
Technology: What is with all these buttons and blinking lights, what does any of this even do? Why would anyone need anything more than a Lisp REPL in a bare terminal?
Code: JAVASCRIPT DELENDA EST. Everything but Rust and Lisp are shit and PHP literally gives you brain cancer.
Society: Ted Kaczynski was right about everything. Burn it all down and return to monke.
Your stupid project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Hacker News itself: used to be good, but now it's turning into Reddit. Who let these people in here? I bet half of them have never even written a compiler.
At least we are self-aware and can have a laugh at ourselves.
Don't forget Julia!
(Always felt Cuban got lucky during the early days of the gold rush. I feel that way about most financially successful people though?)
I think that definition missed a few HN personality types.
It forgot unsuccessful, lonely, egotistical, disenfranchised, shut-in's---like myself.
It made me trigger even more for the exact reason you mentioned.
It's amusing that's the supporting point line, because whoever wrote the entry is placing their self in the category they're trying to peg HN with. I was in business with Mark across a bunch of years, he has always had an interest in news, news aggregation sites, information acquisition and delivery in general. He was familiar with Hacker News, including understanding its association with Y Combinator, and he always liked it when BlogMaverick posts hit the front page. He understood its relevance in the tech ecosystem.
For years after Mark set up his venture capital business, he (his team) used Y Combinator's various public docs as the foundation for the investment agreements.
While I was transitioning to a software job I found myself checking HN a lot because it seemed like a raw discussion forum for what software engineers were thinking / talking about. Seemed better than Reddit. Still haven't found a better alternative.
[... Ha, my entire career! So we call it "remote" now? And its considered a progressive perk? Awesome! For decades I just thought I was "working in bed" and it wasn't something to talk about ...]
... really do need a facsimile for interesting and stimulating water cooler conversation. Until I find that place, Hacker News will do!
An Onion article would be even greater praise.
On a more serious note, I for one plan on continuing to lurk and comment here until I achieve the unprecedented entrepreneurial financial success that I know my lurking and commenting here more than qualify me for!
I realize this is a really shitty post and I wish I had the time to rework it to sound less prissy.
99% of entrepreneur fail , that’s literally why it’s hard and why it’s highly respected !
Remember when Tesla almost went Bankrupt ? It’s very like because it happens almost three times... and only now after 25+ years Tesla is making a profit by selling its cars without sorcery finances...
Being an entrepreneur is hard , I love the Tesla example because even if Elon Musk had the vision and a superior engineering delivery , the company was technically a commercial failure for more than a decade.
Being a better than average engineer ( probably a LOT of HN uses ) is unfortunately not enough to become a sucessfull entrepreneur !
On the other hand, I still find this amusing.
Where opinion is being manipulated by the U.S. security/military complex.