Hacker News Reader

Comment by knaik94 | Hacker News Reader

Popular HN story topics are pretty narrow when it comes to seeing the bigger picture of what's going on in the world.

I don't check often but a quick way to see interesting topical news is seeing the trending tab on Twitter. It's not always meaningful but it does a good job exposing me to things that I wouldn't choose to look up.

HN lacks meaningful discussion on basically any works of art, like films and tv. Sports aren't brought up either. It's not just politics that gets left out. Book recommendations on HN are also mostly focused on productivity and tech. I appreciate that it creates an environment that's not emotionally taxing but I also realize that it is a bubble.

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> HN lacks meaningful discussion on basically any works of art, like films and tv. Sports aren't brought up either. It's not just politics that gets left out. Book recommendations on HN are also mostly focused on productivity and tech.

And i think that's exactly the reason why so many tech enthusiasts are here.

I don't really care about celebrity news, tv, sports.

Even then, that news can be very local. Not everyone is interested in the saga of Verstappen ( from my country) vs. Hamilton in F1 sports.

I think most people don't care about art here either. But are curious about art generated by ML.

> I don't check often but a quick way to see interesting topical news is seeing the trending tab on Twitter.

The trending tab on Twitter is awful. It's the kind of news stories that are viral, not important.

It's also personalized, for better or worse, so something "trending" on your page may have 5k likes compared to 25k for more mainstream topics.

I second that. It's a bubble with great breadth of topic vs insightful comments ratio. But in the grand scheme of things, it's still a bubble.

> It's a bubble with great breadth of topic vs insightful comments ratio.

For a narrow range of topics, yes.

But ironically not with anything that might be relevant to analyzing news in general, which is why such stories tend to be banned or flagged, or burst into flames.

> anything that might be relevant to analyzing news in general

I am curious to know what you mean by that ?

I mean news not related to tech. World events, politics, philosophy, art, science (outside of CS), etc. A forum of programmers and developers where mainstream news isn't even on topic unless it presents evidence of some "new or interesting phenomenon" isn't going to post the most important news of the day to begin with (it would likely be flagged as off topic) nor be capable of in-depth conversation about such matters most of the time.

Hacker News just isn't the place to go to be informed about the world.

I wonder if there is a place on the internet with the format of HN and a not so dissimilar quality of comments but focused on World events, philosophy, art, science ( excluding politics because it's too prone to flamewars).

By the way (off topic), sometimes there are threads on HN, that superficially look interesting, but that feel kind of "primitive" if you are used to read philosophy. I notice them probably because on other forum I just expect the thread to be not interesting at all.

I don't have an example at hand, but in those occasions it made me think there must be some kind of corollary of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect"[0] at play.

[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

>I wonder if there is a place on the internet with the format of HN and a not so dissimilar quality of comments but focused on World events, philosophy, art, science ( excluding politics because it's too prone to flamewars).

Probably Reddit TBH, but also probably not the main subreddit for any particular topic, so it might take some digging. I hear good things about the quality of /r/askhistorians for instance. Also r/anime_titties/ (seriously.) Occasionally someone will post a thread here about high quality subreddits.

Thanks for reminding me of /r/askhistorians. I had not registered it in my mind as a source for general consumption. But what the heck is r/anime_titties/ about :) ? The feed is interesting , but I can't make up my mind on what the main topic of interest is.

lesswrong.com maybe? It's an even stronger bubble than HN, but more focused on philosophy and making sense of things.

On lesswrong, from memeory and in my very humble opinion, the ratio insights to (pompous?) lengthy sentences is way too low. But I will take a look again.

Really? For months the twitter trending tab has only bern corona topics from each side of the spectrum, almost nothing else.

Right now US trending topics that show up for me are football, mets baseball, a celebrity birthday, #caturday, YouTube TV losing disney, Bleach anime, a popular basketball player who was vocally anti-vax entering covid protocol and is barred from playing, Taylor Swift, and an Esports team playing Halo Infinite. I can see worldwide trends but not directly on Twitter.

It's not all important news, but it's really different from what I see on HN and what I would choose to read about.

The news category on twitter for me shows #hodl, a shooting in japan, #womenwhocode, Theranos trial, Amazon warehouse working conditions, Maxwell trial, Omicron news from South Africa, California wildfire, among other things.

HN never has two sides on important topics such as vaccines and science. It also used to be extreamly unaware of Googles role in controlling and censoring the entire Internet but that has changed in the last few years and there is hope of awareness here.

I just find it quite narrow minded in the other topics and very much in the "don't question science" camp.

I’ve yet to meet a single person that wasn’t into some weird pseudoscience or just full of hubris that likes to categorize a philosophy of “listen to the experts, look at the literature not isolated studies” as “don’t question science.”

I listen to experts, just the ones arguing that the vaccines are dangerous.

Since when were we not allowed to listen to the experts we think make sense to us? I feel like social media has polarized us so much we can't even talk to eachother anymore if we don't listen to the same experts.

You listen to only one side of the expert argument, that’s an issue. Let’s switch the topic to climate change, would anyone on HN give weight to the 1% of ‘experts’ that deny climate change? No of course not because the consensus of reasonable experts is that climate change is here. Consensus of scientific thought is how we filter for what is true to the best of our knowledge.

>would anyone on HN give weight to the 1% of ‘experts’ that deny climate change?

Yes. Name any consensus opinion and at least one contrarian will show up to denounce it. Just look at COVID - every single thread about it is packed with anti-vaxxers and skeptics.

HN is still a decent news aggregator as long as you turn on "showdead" and browse through new submissions a bit. Upvoted stories and comments are more often one-sided, but there is lots of diversity in what gets submitted, and even discussed at the margins, including some crazy stuff but also some interesting stuff you definitely would not find discussed in mainstream news.

Ah, the 2 sides.. the rational side, and the conspiracy-riddled side.

Of course both sides believe they're the rational one, and the other side is the nutjob wacko one.. and both believe they're right.

I personally would argue that the HN community does a good job at applying the scientific method and question unsupported conclusions.

I don't think it's about believing which side is right. Many subjective topics aren't popular on HN because there's no way to reach a census. I have also noticed that most comments don't engage with exaggerated and flame bait language. People are generally listened to and responded to respectfully. There's going to be exceptions, but I see less troll type comments on HN and that's why I respect it as a source.

The "nutjob wacko" opinions are respectfully heard and then respectfully torn apart.

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