Hacker News Reader

Comment by macocha | Hacker News Reader

Naming of Hacker News is like Open AI.

I miss when this place was full of wide-eyed CS undergrads, now it's just "Exploits in Venture Capitalism". Everyone has grown up and gotten themselves high paying, boring adtech jobs so now they feel the need to defend surveillance capitalism and "intellectual property" at every turn. We used to make fun of illegal numbers and censorship efforts, now we support them. I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.

Perhaps, but also the new generation didn't know anything else. There's plenty of fresh grads where I work, here, and elsewhere, who just don't value that fight as much or see it as the winnable-struggle-against-the-empire like we did.

I'm sure having a few kids takes the wind out of the middle-aged pirate ship's sails, but there are plenty of younger folks here who just value the startup culture, technology for its own sake, hustle, and have other values we can admire.

I adore the level of professionalism, diligence, and expertise I'm seeing in new grads who grew up knowing what a giant software company is (unlike us when they were kind of emerging as we were kids).

Well, this site was started and is still run by YCombinator, so that tension has always been there, and is in fact part of what makes it so great. (I sympathize mostly with the wide-eyed undergrads though.)

I think the difference is that our goals with startups has changed. Money has always been important, but other things matter too. They still do, but I believe money has weighting that money has to the equation has significantly increased.

I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?

I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.

I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.

I actually see a lot of comments, frequently, on this site pretending to hate surveillance capitalism and sticking up their noses at adtech, at every turn, particularly when used by some tiny little niche website that's just barely scraping by. This despite, presumably, many of these same people working for some of the biggest adsludge-pumping companies on the planet.

I'm willing to bet that there are a bunch of users here that don't work for those companies. Even more that might, but not in those departments. The latter might be more in line with what you're getting at, but we need to be careful casting too wide of a net. I want to convert those people, not push them away.

>Even more that might, but not in those departments.

So by some odd alchemy, if you take your salary from a company that creates it from things you morally detest, but you don't work in those specific departments, you're not at all a hypocrite?

It's like a libertarian working for the Stasi but saying it's alright because he's only doing microphone maintenance for them.

> I want to convert those people, not push them away.

On this I sympathize, though it has its limits too.

  > So by some odd alchemy

I'm not looking for a fight. I'm not sure why you decided to ignore the following sentence. If you want to cut comments apart with a scalpel you'll be able to find whatever you're looking for.

HN has always had lots of startup content; in fact it started life as "Startup News". If anything, there is less such content here than there used to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com