Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

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I guess what I'm confused by here is that the author seemed to recognize that news is inherently biased to be negative, that negative (general) news was never actually important or actionable to them, and that getting that news was just bad for them overall.

Then he got annoyed at tech news being bad, and came to the opposite conclusion. That all the negative tech news must be correct, and that they have the agency to change it.

But the reality is the opposite. Just like for general news, tech newd has a bias for the negative, and the reality is a lot better than you'd think if you just take the HN frontpage at face value.

The scenarios that motivate the author are so improbable that they border on absurd. And if they were to happen, the plan of writing your own browser wouldn't help anyway, or at least would not be anywhere near the best way of addressing it.

Want to write your own browser as a hobby? Great, go for it! But the justification isn't even internally confident.

No it's not the tech news that he's saying is bad, it's the ads.

Huh? The author is very explicitly writing first about general news, and then about tech news.

> I do like to follow tech news, and for me, this is done 98% through Ycombinator’s hacker news. But I started to get the same feeling I had ten years ago: it’s all negative.

That's followed by the list of some sample categories negative tech news that they are concerned about. Most of them have nothing to do with ads. Even for browsers only one of the things they are concerned with is ads (and it's not something that actually happened, it's something the author imagines could happen).

Most countries do better every year. There are only a small number of countries that are worse off than, say, five years ago.

Especially giants like China and India are doing very well.

See: https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index

most of the bad news of companies is driven by the profit motive. that's where the connection to ads is. they are also driven by the profit motive. (there is also news about companies pushing more ads)

the conclusion of this author is that the profit motive will drive companies to build ads into browsers. (microsoft is already putting ads into windows. browsers will be next)

I read it differently than ads:

> the ONLY thing you hear on the news.. any news.. are bad things(tm). War, corruption, you name it.

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