Is hacker “news” a lot less about hacker and more about news? | Hacker News Reader

Is hacker “news” a lot less about hacker and more about news?

58 pointsmachinekob45 comments

I feel like there is a lot more "news" about stuff outside whole hacker/cs space mostly economy/politics + some personal blog shilling past few months.

Or I just got into some sort of a buble and see only politics and economy for past few months, what are you think guys?

View on HN

HN has shifted from a tech entrepreneur centered content to tech worker centered content over the last few years. There are fewer founder stories, VC/funding stories, leadership stories, and more labor, social, and arguably political stories. I can't see how someone could frame this as HN loosing its focus, but I'm going to argue something else: we're cooperatively territorializing hacking outside of tech a way that evokes more of the TMRC[1] definition than the 90's SV definition.

1. http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html

Yeah, kinda seems like it's shifting somewhat away from tech bros and towards actual hackers.

'Hacker News'? I thought it was 'Twitter News' these days.

Right, I'm talking about over a timespan of like 10 years.

Meanwhile other users have the opposite complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33648369

It's an optimization problem that never reaches anyone's optimum!

Question: why not write custom code to ping yourself at email when someone @dang?

Just curious because I would have figured it would do something given how often everyone uses it.

I don't know. Maybe because it's better for it to require a bit of activation energy.

Not really. The "Show HN" content is more in-line with the TMRC definition. The labor and social content is orthogonal to hacking, it's more about the experience of low and middle-level software engineers/managers in large tech companies. The "techbros" of old HN actually talked about what and how they were building, though the puff personality/PR pieces were pretty stupid also. If we could have more actual hacking or building content, I'd be over the moon, but that's not what's happening here. I'm actively looking for a more interesting/balanced forum than HN at this point. Not every discussion about tech has to be from the point of view of a mid-level Big Tech/F100 engineer.

> If we could have more actual hacking or building content, I'd be over the moon, but that's not what's happening here

Can you give some specific examples of what you'd like to see more of?

Edit: do these count? They're currently all in the top 10:

Show HN: Run unsafe user generated JavaScript in the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33673047 - Nov 2022 (3 comments)

TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33670963 - Nov 2022 (13 comments)

Redbean Tiddlywiki Saver - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33670382 - Nov 2022 (14 comments)

Show HN: A Browser-Based First Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33670353 - Nov 2022 (28 comments)

HelenOS: a microkernel-based, multiserver OS from scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33670177 - Nov 2022 (47 comments)

Today (right now's) frontpage is fantastic, I'm super happy. I realize there's only so much y'all moderators can do given that this deluge of tech news is coming from the users of this site. Thanks for doing what y'all do, and yeah these are great posts!

HN is whatever its users make it. It evolves according to the user community's perceived needs and interests. Attempts to define it one way or another (and often coerce conformity) are dysfunctional and pathological. If you don't like it now, perhaps you will like it next year.

Well, people in power can set the standards and ban people who violate them. So the user base does have some bias preventing certain drift (not that saying that's good or bad, just how it is).

If you browse the "ask" and "show" sections more than the homepage then it seems a lot more hacker-centered :)

^ This... a lot of the techie hackie geeky nerdy stuff is in the ask/show sections. The front page is mostly resharing news, the ask/show is where people get personal about their own interests, questions, solutions, etc.

Hacker - in a sense of someone who uses non standard approach to look at things. This matched the idea and still does.

What saddens me is deteriorating quality of discussions. I miss times/places when people had intellectual curiosity and respect to opponent's opinion if it doesn't lie along with yours. Perhaps it inevitably goes together with extended audience, but I do miss it. It still largely stands - luckily it's not reddit yet, but tendencies are somewhat obvious.

Well, whenever we talk about hacking we get a massive influx of pro-DRM and corporate defense comments so "hacking" existing things without consent of the corporate owner hasn't been popular here in years now :)

The system fluctuates. Sometimes a large fluctuation happens and some people perceive that as a long-term trend. Posts like this have therefore been appearing for about as long as HN has existed. Years ago I tracked down a set of examples, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

Another factor: when HN fluctuates in an undesirable direction, relative to what one would like to see, one experiences it as a noticeable negative shift. But when the fluctuation subsides, the reversion-to-norm doesn't get noticed nearly as much. This bias seems to influence most of the general perceptions people have about HN*. It explains why the perceptions are so conflicting, e.g. "HN has become Twitter news" vs. "dang can we at least have one discussion about this?" or, less nicely, "why are you suppressing this story you VC plutocrat lackey".

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I've felt this way too at times. Then I think about writing a post like yours and scan the top 30 headlines for anything that doesn't seem like it involves STEM, startups/entrepreneurs or Tech companies and their people/woes.

Right now I come up with 4 out of 30. Items I consider not HN worthy: Buffet/Munger comments about crypto (crypto discussions are mostly about finance these days not tech), Gravedigging 101, Apple rankings (the fruit not the tech company) and one about beer sales at the World Cup.

Economic discussions can be interesting and that leads to the point I've seen dang make that even though a topic may not sound like it applies, HN is about hackers commentary about the topic. So a topic about the economy or stocks might have a HN slant about careers at companies where total comp includes RSU's and commentary about attrition or whatever.

I think HN is vastly better than other online forums about filtering content and commentary. Flag things you don't think are appropriate and vote down comments that don't contribute to the discussion in some way.

that actually is what hacker news is and always should have been.

There used to be more VC and "inspiring founder" stories, but you know after 20 years of those we realised its mosly luck and connection, not stamina and found er endurance that moves the needle.

I for one enjoy the new format and on the "real hacker news" thats actually mostly show and tell "here i did this thing, there is the exploit, enjoy!"

My reason for returning here are clearly the comments and the industry wisdom i would not get anywhere else and with a lot less "pretend experts" like reddit or other armchair guessers.

In addition to hn, i suggest the "devopsish" subreddit though, they have a lot of interesting stuff, that would not be interesting enough for hn

I think there are still some really in-depth, really interesting articles posted on here that you're much less likely to see on, say, /r/programming. like the thread today from @mosquitocapital about 30 SRE/SRE-adjacent scenarios that billion+ DAU social media platforms need to consider. Some of the comments from those posts are also really, really interesting.

Also consider that tech at the moment is going through some insane sea changes that definitely affect entrepreneurs and hackers starting stuff, so lots of news is to be expected

Hackers tend to not like politics. But we have figured out that those who don't do politics will still have politics done to them. So we have to care about politics at least to some degree. If nothing else, we have to care about it as a sometimes-hostile external force.

Same with the economy, except that most of us do care about money, at least to some degree.

Generally, tech is applied to real world problems. It's advantageous to be informed about one's current environment so you can create something useful.

It definitely feels like a lot of current events lately, that don’t have any particular technology aspect. I’ve been flagging them. Hopefully that is the right thing to do.

Yes and you should also be aware of how pronounced the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is here. You'll probably figure it out if you come across any discussion on a topic you're keenly involved in and have some level of knowledge about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

It's what the community makes of it - want to see more "hacker" posts?

Share them :)

Perhaps you saw more politics everywhere as it was also time for us midterm elections

Happens every election season. You should have seen this place in 2016.

At this point, HN feels like it's just an ElonTwitter subreddit.

This is not intended as an insult, but as an observation: the average tech proficiency level of a lot of commenters on HN seem to be at the earlier stages of their career, or they quickly switched out of the technical work and into management.

This is not to say the work they do is not valuable - quite the opposite. Noobs make the world go round. That said, it also means you can't blame them for technically shallow content.

And anyway, Hacker News as a name always struck me as more or less a marketing gimmick.

The technical level can seem very impressive until you read a thread on a topic that you know very well.

FWIW, I still appreciate hearing from other armchair experts. Even their limited knowledge is better than my zero knowledge.

I just imagine that every poster could be anyone between a 16-year-old script kiddie or the CTO of a multinational. Or, you know, both.

Of course it's a statistical thing. Each person knows a limited number of things, and an even smaller number (maybe zero) at an expert level. Yet there are many many topics. The vast majority of people have no expertise in the vast majority of topics. Although asking questions and otherwise participating is how the noobs learn, even the noobs who are experts in something else (or think they are in the current thing).

https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/#The_Gell-Mann_amnesia...

I like the mixture.

FAANG bubble

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...and if my comments really piss you off, try:

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    > FTX
    > Musk

Very nice! How can I add friends on HN?!

  >My solution: uBlock Origin...

Wow! --this is a brilliant idea. I'd been trying to hack something together in GreaseMonkey to do something like this. But unfortunately my JS-foo is practically non-existent. So I never got very far with it. I never even thought of trying to do it with uBO.

Mind you, my ABP filter syntax knowledge is about as flakey as my understanding of JS. Nevertheless, this is what I've got so far:

  #block submissions with these domains...
  #or with this in the title...
  news.ycombinator.com#?#tr.athing > td.title > span:-abp-contains(/[Tt]witter/):upward(tr)
  news.ycombinator.com#?#tr.athing > td.title > span:-abp-contains(/[Yy]ou[Tt]ube/):upward(tr)
  news.ycombinator.com#?#tr.athing > td.title > span:-abp-contains(/[Ee]moji/):upward(tr)
  news.ycombinator.com#?#tr.athing > td.title > span:-abp-contains(/[Ww]orld [Cc]up/):upward(tr)
  news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing > td.title > span:-abp-contains(/[Pp]interest/):upward(tr)

It's a bit clunky to write and it leaves the 'submitted by' line behind. But already my HN viewing is 23% less annoying.

Do any of you ABP syntax gurus out there know a less clunky way to match case insensitively? For some reason the -abp-contains() filter is case sensitive and uBO doesn't accept a regex with /(?i)keyword/ or /(?i)[keyword]/

This is brilliant. Thanks!

Can I suggest making a Github/Gitlab/other project out of this? Reason being because those platforms typically offer Atom feeds folks can subscribe to for updates.

This is actually great! Filters out a lot of the sensationalism.

I’ve been banned from HN many times and I’ll get banned again for ban evading (on top of flagged etc). Yes, HN has fallen wayside - not recently, but awhile back. Has nothing to do with election cycles, people just love shitposting, dogpiling and other nonsense.

I’m trying to find a good HN replacement that’s nuts and bolts hackerdom with a bit of edgy posting thrown in so it’s not sterile, but it’s hard to find.

I worked a cleaner in McDonalds. On the first Saturday, a guy came in with has family, eat, and left a complaint. I thought this was an issue but I was told this guy comes ever Saturday and always complains. Right enough, he did the next weekend and the next…

I never understood it. But every so often, I spot it again.

Lobste.rs is quite good, but a lot slower and much less discussion than HN. So IMHO it’s less engaging and less fun. Not bad, just different.

We don't care about "ban evading" in the sense that anyone is welcome to make a new account as long as they play by the rules. But as you know you can't post like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33671870

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33664971

...so, er, yes I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with!

It's been economics and politics for a while. Yeah, HN readers have to pay attention to this but it's more opinionated and less technical than "computer stuff". Maybe it's a sign of economic/political stability vs. technological stagnation? And, of course, layoffs are important to know about due to their effect on the industry as a whole.

News, as well, as the multiple Taylor Swift articles point out. Perhaps the number of vaguely(?) pleasant places to e-chat are decreasing?

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