Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpeterson | Hacker News Reader

Too late. HN has basically become reddit.com/r/programming in the last year or so. The glory days are over. You have to admire how long the quality remained high, though.

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Even though I had to highlight the text of your comment to read it, you do echo a point that has kind of irritated me somewhat. On a website called "hacker news", 90% (hyperbole) of the links are related to designing flashy GUIs and selling social web startups and whatever the flavor-of-the-week web design trend is. There's very little "do it yourself, do it quickly, do what no one has done before" spirit, it's mostly "do what everyone has done before, but flashier and in a newer language".

Not that it's a bad thing in any way, but the title of "hacker news" is a bit disingenuous when "developer news" might be a little more accurate. I wish I could filter out the programming and startup stuff.

Hacker News was originally called Startup News; that would still be a more accurate title.

What's disingenuous about programming on a site called "Hacker News," and what would be left other than political posts if you took out the startup and programming stuff?

It's not just the programming stuff I wish I could filter, it's the worship of Ruby, node.js, CSS, etc. Web languages that really aren't useful in the hacker sense of the word, but rather in the business sense of the word.

My opinion wasn't so much about what would replace those posts, but what not having those posts would attract.

This is anecdotal, but I've seen more Python articles in the past couple of weeks than Ruby. node.js is a pretty useful tool for random hackery, and most of the CSS articles have been "hacks" for creating cool UIs. I like to think of the "Hacker" in Hacker News as someone who employs neat tricks to get the job done.

Are you looking for news related to network security?

Network security would be one aspect of hacking (actually the aspect I am employed in). Breaking out of the confines of an API would be another, or just doing something because you want to see if it can be done, not because you're following a tutorial on GitHub. Actually, someone on reddit put it best related to their plans for a Darknet project: "don't expect help from Hacker News, if it doesn't have a business plan they won't be interested." Hackers don't care about business plans. The site used to be called "Startup News", in the days when the original redditors were pining for the days of the original reddit base. Based on the content still present, Startup News is still quite fitting.

In short, simply re-creating something in a new-wave language is what I'm kind of complaining about. That's not "hacking", that's just good programming.

Hacker means people who hack on code. Why aren't languages like Ruby relevant.

At least in my view of the term, creating intelligent code isn't "hacking". It's just being a good programmer. Hacking would be doing something that hasn't been done before on a wide scale with the intention of creating a result that varies from what an average user would expect. The jailbreakers hacked sideloaded applications onto their iPhone. The average user followed their directions and achieved expected, predictable results.

Ruby _can_ be used hacking. "How to recreate Path in Ruby" does not a "hack" make.

It's not that they aren't relevant. I think it's the frequency of mention of said languages that is the problem to the above poster.

There are a number of good science posts that make the frontpage. This is originally what kept me on this site.

I wish I could filter out the gadget-fanboyism. I guess I couldn't read it, but it's exasperating to see how much animosity is inflamed by such a petty subject.

I came over from Reddit this last month, the number of memes just become too much for me.

May I make the suggestion of installing Reddit Enhancement Suite. Unsubscribe from all the default sub/r's (wtf, offbeat,askreddit, etc), and block all posts from imgur and quickmeme, and things look a lot better.

Doesn't really help. The Reddit "culture" infects everything, not just the main subs.

I suppose for example /r/gamedev isn't awful, but really, GameDev.net is much bigger and better. There's little reason to bother with Reddit.

I did all this actually. I blocked imgur, so the majority of the posts were from Tinypic. The whole community has changed.

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