Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree,

"I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here"

That said, there is still a lot of that stuff. But the proportion of various topics have definitely shifted over the years.

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The HN guideline says "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" can be on-topic. In my opinion this summary is pretty much correct and also useless, because hackers seem to be curious about almost everything. I am interested in politics after all. But I don't think HN is or can be a good venue for political discourses. Of course some links can be very political and yet marginally technological due to the overreaching influence of technology over society, but there are annoyingly political links that I used to flag immediately nowadays.

I'm also concerned that the front page seems to prefer topics that only make sense in USA and especially California. For example I found following links posted today to be especially domestic:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806363 The Off-Grid Laws of Every State in America

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809517 Tesla’s Texas Move Is Latest Sign of California Losing Tech Grip

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812137 America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

Yeah, you can still argue that they somehow gratifify someone's intellectual curiosity. For me they don't.

There are so few sites out there where you can have a real discussion about “ anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”. I recall posting on a space subreddit an article that talked about mining asteroids for water, and it was abundantly obvious that zero of the responders read past the title (which only mentioned mining asteroids, not the water part). Hacker News is far from perfect, but here at least you have some real hope that others will read the posted article and drive a discussion based on the specific content. I would hate for this site to be too tech focused… I mean what other site would I go to if I read, for example, a great article on theory of the mind, an obscure language, etc.

The intellectual curiosity rule was fine when most people in here were hackers.

Now hacker news has become the exception.

Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

There has always been a strong anti-authoritarian ethos to hacker culture, one where personal privacy and bodily autonomy and the right to encryption were intrinsically at odds with corporate and government attempts to control and surveil, and I hope that doesn't go away.

> Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

Well, yes, but usually from an aesthetic perspective, rather than a moralistic one. E.g. bad laws and cronyism being seen as ugly hacks and misfeatures on what could be a beautiful and elegant system of law; the cleverness of computer intrusion being more important than its consequences; the Internet (Tor, cryptocurrency, whatever) "routing around damage" — i.e. systems of law that seek to constrain behavior — and this being seen as "natural and inevitable" in the same way one might prescribe no moral agency to carnivorous animals killing their prey; etc.

Communities that start out full of hacker-aesthetes, seem to invariably shift to being full of engineer-moralists. HN wasn't purely a hacker-aesthete community when it started — it was tempered with a good number of other types of people — but they're certainly even more rare here now.

I mean there is and has been wide diversity in thought within the hacker community, so there's certainly people who view things only through asthetics.

But I don't think that erases the presence of explicitly moral/ethical thoughts within the hacker community. The philosophical and political manifest in the hacker community in many forms: anarchic, communal, utopian, anti authority, anti centralization, pro equality and merit, etc.

For example: From The Hacker Manifesto

"... You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals...."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Manifesto

also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

It mostly has gone away. There is a certain type of corporation that we just have to trust now, since seemingly noone is qualified to judge the brilliant people who work there or the merits of their product. Some jurisdictions even require you to prove you use this product as a condition of employment or entry into business establishments.

Yes please. People trying to discuss those topics on here makes me come back less. It’s probably the worst part of the site for me overall.

Would you be interested in a wrapper around hacker news that lets you filter to only technical discussions?

(I'm already playing with wrapping it so that probably isn't hard to add)

If I could filter all politics out of hacker news that would be great. the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"

I have filtered a lot of politics on twitter by blocking prominent politicians and mute words.

> the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"

Does such a broad brush add to the discussion?

Disagreement can be healthy. I'd say the varied political and philosophical perspectives of HN and Slashdot contributed a lot to changing my worldview. (Hopefully for the better, though we're all still learning.)

I'm simply not at all interested in political topics here and don't care about the (potential) healthy disagreement. Those threads always derail and spiral to opinions and "us vs. them" mentality.

Never have I found a political comment section here that helped me emerge enlightened. I tried for years, eventually gave up and I'm objectively feeling better because of it.

I added a flag for technical and then sort it by hot [1]. I just needed to train a classifier so there's less manual classification needed.

Maybe something like a naive bayes [0] will work? I'm not sure if it's the best dataset. I could make my own dataset by just looking at how many removed comments there are :P

I haven't implemented a classifier before so it may take me a few days. If you'd like to be notified when it's actually working send me an email at info@{the site name}

[0] - https://www.kaggle.com/kinguistics/classifying-news-headline...

[1] - https://efficientdemocracy.com/technical-and-hot

These types of articles are actually what kept me here. The unique blend of comp sci, and socio-political-economic-whatever discussions is fantastic.

I second this. Twitter and Reddit are not places I’m interested in participating in any kind of political discussion but for whatever reason I’m inclined to participate here, frequently against my better judgement to just stay quiet. I’m coming here regardless because it’s how I keep my finger on the pulse of the industry and for better or worse use that to make most of my tech leadership decisions at work, so it’s nice to be able to do both in one place.

That said I probably spend too much time here because of it.

I really think it makes the site worse. I’m already an avid Twitter user, I come to Hacker News for discussions and content that I couldn’t find anywhere else. The political discourse on here is just lower-quality and less interesting than on Twitter.

If you think the discourse here is lower quality than on twitter, I'd really like to know how you're curating your twitter feed.

Aggressively. I'm constantly following new people and unfollowing loads of other people. I try to keep a good mix of tech, music, and philosophy in with all the policy and politics. I also liberally mute and block. Only way to make it usable, but the result is far better than political discourse on Hacker News.

Any specific recommendations for consistently good/high signal-to-noise accounts for tech, philosophy, policy, and politics?

Yes it is good. I truly believe there is no engineering in a vaccum — I don't mean morally, like it's "not right" to not consider the context, but rather not considering the context is simply incomplete engineering.

Lately 60% of HN's front page is indistinguishable from Ars Technica. Just common denominator techy or popsci news.

I'd rather see a post about yet another JS framework honestly.

That's fairly constant over time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816110

I actually think this is a problem hackers have in general. It's the Zuckerberg problem. You build something cool, you want to talk about all the tricks you did to scale to N billion users and all anyone can talk about is that genocide you caused. You just built the tech, right? It's all about the Tech. Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willing to openly talk about that. Is it easier to pretend that stuff doesn't exist? Sure. But it does exist, and we do need to actually discuss what happens in the real world due to the technology we work on.

Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willing to openly talk about that. Is it easier to pretend that stuff doesn't exist? Sure. But it does exist, and we do need to actually discuss what happens in the real world due to the technology we work on.

I agree with you, and I'm not asking anybody to pretend that anything doesn't exist. It's just that I would prefer that the "politics / culture / social / whatever" conversations happen somewhere else. But that's just me. I understand that not everyone will agree.

Even better, I'd like to see "How I wrote my own Guile interpreter in COBOL, added Java and Rebol interop, ported it to the Raspberry Pi, and interfaced it with my handbuilt analog computer, and then built a startup out of it."

Zuck and his employees at Facebook need to talk about the social impacts of their tech, for sure. But why does that topic need to be discussed on HN? We (both broader society, as well as the subset of it that makes up the "tech community") have other forums for that.

I too, would like an echo chamber, please.

There's a big difference between restricting topics, and restricting viewpoints. The latter creates echo chambers, the former doesn't.

Facebook created React to get notifications to show up in real time so you no longer needed to refresh the page. There's a place for discussion on the impact of realtime notifications on mental health, and a place for discussion on the use cases of React. You absolutely can separate conversations about technologies from their impact

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