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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of comments lamenting the downfall of HN recently and they almost always focus on poor comments. In my opinion the troublesome trend on HN has been stories like this (or yesterday's bash redirection cheat sheet) making it to the front page. This is Hacker News not Un*x For Dummies.

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Meanwhile, outside your ego, some of us actually found that useful, unlike all the reposted tech crunch, naive life advice and "how to get funding like a baws" articles.

YMMV

I'm sorry, I did not mean to be egotistical. I guess I assumed that no "hacker" had typed `cd /usr/local` or `cd /etc` without wondering about origins of the names enough to search out the most cursory explanation.

For what its worth, I never read the TC links;)

The thing I think your assumption ignores is that there are infinite things that we encounter on a daily basis that have interesting explanations. Different people, even different "hackers", are going to be attracted to different topics to explore. Sharing the topics that we've explored is exactly what I come here for.

We all type all day, but we haven't all dug into how keyboards work. We look at screens all day, but we haven't all learned about monitor technology, sometimes even at the "cursory" level. Not having done it yet doesn't disqualify us from being real "hackers".

I have lurked/read hacker news for a few years before creating an account, and frankly, stories like this have always made the front page, MORE frequently in the past if anything.

If you look for an issue, you will surely find one.

Although your account is definitely not "less than a year old", I suspect the following HN guideline [1] might still apply:

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What is with the complaints about the "downfall" of quality recently? If you don't like the article, just don't upvote it. Writing a comment for the article about how it shouldn't be here isn't serving any purpose.

There's no way to downvote an article, and as the community grows larger, simply not upvoting is not enough to stop bad articles making the frontpage.

Odd, though, that a 7 year old article can turn up as news.

This effect isn't odd at all. It is explained quite well in: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Recently? People have been singing that tune for years!

There has been an annoyingly noticable uptick in the past week or so.

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