Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?

24 pointshhm52 comments

"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Do you think the current Hacker News fully achieves this? and the main question here: do you think this site really achieves keeping a good hacker community together?

(I'm not a native English speaker, sorry for grammar)

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I'm cautiously optimistic. A lot of hackers I meet say that they read it. And traffic continues to rise: we now get about 6500 unique visitors a day, and about 65k pageviews.

Thanks fantastic. Many, many thanks for creating and nurturing this community.

Yes! One of the few places I feel right at home.

It's pretty hard to focus on pure hacking (including interesting articles not about startups) when something glamorous like startups is on everybody's minds. programming.reddit.com has been pretty good about sticking to pure programming stuff, but perhaps as long as Hacker News is affiliated with Y Combinator and the startup world, we'll never be able to build a pure hackers' community... simply because startups are so cool and garner impulsive interest.

Maybe there should be a separate hacker.news.ycombinator.org, similar to a sub-Reddit?

Edit: Again, when I say "pure hacking" articles, I don't mean just stuff about programming. I mean anything that is "generally interesting to hackers", like jey mentioned in his comment.

I would say it's a more useful tool to hackers that are interested in starting their own business... so useful to startup founders (or to-be founders) ... if you are doing your homework, many of the news you read here you might have already seen in your RSS reader, but I think you can sense the feel of community and how its different with all the other alternatives that are out there, when you see postings that are mostly tagged by Ask YC (I mostly mean postings like this one that is not linked to an article and is starting a discussion) ... The community here is definitely unique, and when discussions begin you can take advantage of who is here, their knowledge and experiences

I don't think so, at least not hackers who are programmers. Most of the interesting links seem to be cross-posted from programming.reddit.com and receive relatively few upvotes.

I know a number of very good hackers and not a single one reads news.ycombinator.com. Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit. You will however find a number of them posting on Lambda the Ultimate, and a few on programming.reddit.com.

My gut feeling is that news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers.

Here is a list of the top 10 items as I edit this post:

1. Number of founders - statistics 163 points by fauigerzigerk 2 days ago | 34 comments

2. Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital (pmarca.com) 30 points by henning 16 hours ago | 16 comments

3. Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live (heroku.com) 19 points by chaostheory 13 hours ago | 6 comments

4. Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder! 88 points by BitGeek 2 days ago | 92 comments

5. The Talent Myth, by Malcolm Gladwell (newyorker.com) 3 points by hhm 2 hours ago | 1 comment

6. Modern Lisp (with support for concurrency) based on Java Virtual Machine (sourceforge.net) 10 points by riobard 11 hours ago | discuss

7. Performance-pay Perplexes (newyorker.com) 25 points by davidw 1 day ago | 5 comments

8. Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective? 2 points by hhm 1 hour ago | 3 comments

9. Exercise on the Brain (nytimes.com) 29 points by jlhamilton 1 day ago | discuss

10. Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail (arstechnica.com) 8 points by muriithi 12 hours ago | 2 comments

I'd say #6 is the only item of technical interest and not a single comment!

The goal is not to have just articles about hacking, but articles of interest to hackers. We're not trying to make something like programming.reddit.com, but something like www.reddit.com was in 2006.

In that aspect I think hacker news is still not getting the message. Three possibilities :

1.To use your own metaphor, if you keep the animal in the cage for a long time, it takes a while for it to figure out that the cage has been lifted. But then this group animal never seems to get the hang of it. Perhaps this is a data point in group theory, namely that a group has far more inertia than single units.

2.Or perhaps the hackers are too busy startupping that they just cant be bothered about Intellectual curiosity

3.Or the third inference is the Hacker types that visit here are not into much else. An article about Pythagoras theorem being useful to measure n-dimensional distances made it into discussion here. In the math circles that concept is akin to understanding a "hello world" program. It is not surprising that experts in one area are totally naive in others, but I was hoping that hacker news could be a tool to alleviate that at least to some extent by bringing pointers and some discussion.

A long time back, I made this comment, and you agreed.

"*8 points by bluishgreen 132 days ago | link It has become apparent that the quality of these social news sites depends on the quality/commitment of the society that is supporting it. It would be very interesting and useful to find out what the start up folks are doing on a daily basis besides thinking about start ups. Like I said, this could be a very good inspiration tool.

Lisp was a landmark in my large scale understanding of computer science. I wonder what are the landmarks in understanding something like physics, or say bio-informatics. What are the problems that these people are facing? Hackers like learning just for the heck of it. In the process we can bring about useful start ups to these domains instead of making another calender application and stacking outside some big huge company in the hopes of being acquired.

I am not asking for a general news site. I am asking for a site where news.yc culture and outlook is preserved, but the domain is slightly relaxed (Note: the relaxing should stop well before we start seeing LOL(pic) in the submissions). If you won't keep the same URL, its ok, as long as you some how figure out how to set up that "outlook""

Its in my nature to be optimistic, but 132 days hence, I don't think we are there yet.

Link to original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31791

to me if pg really wants Hacker News to be more like the old Reddit - to me this is the heart of the problem: http://news.ycombinator.com

It's context. By associating Ycombinator with Hacker News the people visiting it and the people attracted to it will have certain assumptions. Afterall YCombinator is seed funding and business mentoring for the technically and entrepreneurially inclined... is it really a surprise that the content reflects that?

if people really want a generic Hacker News as opposed to something just renamed from Startup News, YC needs to be disassociated with it (at least in name).

Besides as other people have already pointed out there are already plenty of other sites that meet general "hacker" news needs that are "good enough" (programming.reddit, dzone, slashdot, the list goes on...)

Startup News is a unique (and popular) niche of a niche (I haven't seen anything else with a following quite like it) - why change that?

I think the "Hacker" part of the name is a bigger problem. In the old reddit you could found scientists, mathematicians, people from Nasa and so on, none of which would generally understand what's the matter with being a hacker or not.

Sure, but what sort of hacker? Hackers have narrow and deep interests, so they tend to spend time in communities that are narrow and deep like comp.lang.*, Lambda the Ultimate, A List Apart, etc.

Based on the most popular topics, comments, etc I would say Hacker News appeals mostly to people building web apps which generally breaks down into programmers, designers, and perhaps business types. My prior comment indicated why HN doesn't appeal to programmers, and I don't see a lot of deep design topics or discussions either.

I don't think a community that addresses "hackers" in general can work. By its very nature it would have too much noise on topics any given hacker isn't interested in. I suspect that is why the hackers I know spend time in several specialized communities.

to me Hacker News will always be Startup News =)

Lots of my friends still don't read this because it hasn't "sunk in" that it's not just startup news anymore. With perhaps detrimental effects to the pool of submissions - it's not quite reddit.com '96 yet.

Exactly, because this is read by start uppers, and that include programmers, designers, etc.

Cool, reddit when it started was indeed very good. Maybe you can share with readers here, your thoughts on how to prevent hacker news from becoming another reddit. How do you plan to detect and eliminate cliques/cabals of the sort, that now rule the reddit front page. Also, I think it would be a good to have a static page that explains how the yc news karma works.

I think you're being a little too broad with your stereotypes:

"Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit"

"news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers"

I don't think being an advanced programmer and being business oriented are mutually exclusive. While I personally fit your stereotype(business oriented, low end of the technical spectrum--although I'd put myself in the top 10%), I know a few HackerNews readers who are both brilliant hackers and business minded. Plus if you make some money, you have more freedom to hack.

I don't know if being a great programmer, and great at business (as in management, sales, etc), are mutually exclusive or not. However they do seem to require very different attitudes and skills. For example, becoming a great programmer requires an incredible amount of solitary time spent reading, thinking, and programming. This would not be very appealing to someone who feels happiest interacting with other people, which happens to be a skill necessary for management and sales.

My comment certainly wasn't meant to disparage anyone. We all start out at the low end of the continuum on any given subject. A hacker is someone really interested in the subject who dedicates much time and effort to advancing their skill.

Yeah you're right, business is all about people and programming does require an immense amount of solitary intellectual effort. Thanks for the encouragement ("We all start out at the low end of the continuum")! I do hope to have more time someday to focus on developing my technical skills.

I like scientific and business posts. I also like the posts where people talk about specific problems their start-ups are facing.

But I really don't want to hear discussions of politics and religion, especially when they degrade into flame wars. I think there are plenty of other places on the web that people can do that if they are interested. And trust me I have done my fair share. But I don't think Hacker News is the proper forum.

Hacker News seems to have more a MBA/VC bent than "hacker"... ...all of the interesting software design/programming articles seem to be lifted from programming.reddit.com. Discussions on languages, architecture, UI, etc....

Actually that's changed quite a bit, since it became hacker news.

There's far too little non-hacking stuff. I like to code just as much as the next guy, but really, I don't need to read 100 programming and Web 4.0 startup related articles each day. We need more of the "generally interesting to hackers" type of link, and less of the "directly about hacking" type of link.

I'd like to see interesting and stimulating articles on topics within math, biology, sociology, philosophy, economics, etc. I don't mean dry academic articles, but stimulating articles that look at the implications from these fields, observations that affect our understanding and perception of how the universe works. I also enjoy looking at and discussing the Big Questions out there. I tried submitting some stuff relating to my current interests, but they don't seem to get picked up. I think that since this community was seeded as a startup/hacking community, that's the area where we have the most overlap, and those articles get voted up the most. But I bet there's a bias against even clicking on the non-hacking articles that show up on the "new" page.

It would also be nice if the articles on hacking itself were deeper and more technically interesting, but I understand that's not likely to happen, as the audience shrinks as you get technically deeper/specific.

Some random examples of what I consider "Big Questions"

- How harmful is religion?

- What's consciousness?

- Do you need consciousness to build a thinking machine?

- Is math invented or discovered? (maybe there's not much disagreement on this, but I've met at least one person who vehemently disagrees with me)

- Is a technological singularity likely?

- What is the thing I refer to as "I"? How much of "me" can you cut away and still have "me" left?

- What are the evolutionary pressures that made us the way we are, and how have these pressures affected us?

"How Harmful is Religion?" topics are one of the biggest red herring scapegoat topics you can get, and usually come with a generous side of philosophical wankery. I'm glad we don't talk about it much here. I'd recommend discussion of the impact of particular cultural values and beliefs instead.

Personally, on non-hacker topics, I'd be interested to see more on linguistics, the scientific study of language. We can't even begin a real discussion on most of your listed topics until we know how to recognize and establish semantics and metaphors.

The first problem we run into with "how harmful is religion," for example, is that everyone is going to see 'religion' and think of something completely different, but no-one will notice. Everyone will start arguing and get angry because they're confused and don't realize it. The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery. But again, most people ignore that question and dive right into discussion.

I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, than I am interested in hearing about the actual archaeological discoveries that inspire such speculation.

"The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery."

Yeah, that's one of the most interesting parts of the discussion.

"I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, ..."

I'm referring to the sciences of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, not evolutionary punditry. ;-)

You are spot on with that observation. Somebody says "religion" and everybody runs to their corners ready for an argument instead of a discussion. Same goes for "discovery", "soul", or "justice." I spent about 20 minutes retyping my comment above because of the issues around definitions.

The thing is -- everybody wants to argue what the world is based on their definitions, but nobody wants to take the time to compare notes about just what the heck the other guy is talking about.

I've been in some really good net discussions -- discussions that changed my mind about some closely held beliefs. But you first have to get beyond all the pre-defined BS and canned political arguments people learn to a place where everybody is on the same page and thinking for themselves. Otherwise it's just a waste of time: nothing happens except people posturing and talking past each other. I wouldn't want the board to devolve into that.

I voted this up because I agree with the first paragraph, but I don't like most of the specific big questions you list here.

I can't think of any way of saying this without sounding mean, but the type of big questions you list here are the stuff of pseudo-intellectuals. These are Omni magazine big questions (if anyone here remembers that). I'd prefer Economist big questions.

A question being permanently unanswerable or currently out of reach (or "too big") doesn't make it a poor question. I agree that academics focus on questions at the edge of reach with currently available tools, and that's fine and important from a practical standpoint. But I don't think that the validity of the question is determined by whether or not we currently have the tools to attack it. If you're interested in the important political and economic questions that face us today, that's fine, and I agree that in practice it's more immediately valuable to debate and resolve those questions. But I do think that the larger (and possibly unanswerable) questions are interesting to ponder. Maybe I picked a poor list as I wrote the original comment, but as the sibling poster said, the types of questions asked at edge.org are what I'd like to see more of.

I'm surprised that everyone is responding to my list of questions instead of the meat of the post. I just threw that list out there as an illustrative list, the real point I'm trying to make is in the body of the post. I also think that all of those questions I listed have mostly settled answers in academia that aren't popularly accepted by society. (e.g. people still cling to the idea of a "soul" separate from the information content of your brain)

EDIT: I also think that the most interesting work happens when asking questions that are at the edge of being taken seriously.

I highly recommend reading up on linguistics, if you're interested to know why people responded the way they did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

Writing is hard.

The answer lies somewhere in between. The problem with big questions is lack of traction, whereas the problem with small questions is lack of vision. The insightful questions latch onto the pivot points between these two realms, either reshaping the big questions in light of the small answers or visa versa.

I agree, but I'd prefer questions like the kind that are asked at Edge.org: related to technology, physics, mathematics, biology, logic, astronomy, etc.

Reddit, Digg, and even Slashdot already cover all that stuff daily... why do you want another source of it?

There is no reason you can't participate in those sites alongside this one. I like having a place where I know I can find good nerdery.

I like this place because it's solely good nerdery, unlike Slashdot, Digg and Reddit. I think it'd be nice to expand the scope of the nerdery though.

Those questions belong in a late-night dorm room discussion in between bong rips, not Hacker News...

That's exactly why I like news.ycombinator, I can only hope that the community will remain focused for as long as possible (which doesn't mean it shouldn't grow, but it should stick to the hacking/ programming/startup theme so it attracts more dedicated users from these areas and doesn't deviate into a mainstream news aggregator) ... anyway, if you look for articles like those you mentioned in your comment you can always check out reddit.com or other similar sites.

I'm all for discussing these topics, but if you want to start a discussion you've gotta submit a thread. Find an appropriate link around which to discuss or just ask a straight up question.

I think more provocative and deeper issues are great. Only problem is: how do you do provocative/interesting when you have a system where people vote you up or down based on how much they like what you are saying?

If this were pre-copernicus Europe and we were discussing astronomy, some of the most interesting (and as it turned out later, easily verified) ideas would be voted through the floor. Neat discussions about neat topics turn into popularity contests and mob rule, even with a generally neat audience like this.

Perhaps sticking your neck out and taking a position which is uncomfortable and posting and engaging in provocative subjects requires a level of trust that doesn't exist in up-down social sites? It seems the format encourages being interesting and challenging, but only up to a point. I think lots of people confuse being snarky and asinine with having something interesting to say.

So count me in on the more deep questions -- as soon as we don't start voting people up or down based on which clique they are in and instead vote them up or down based on how interesting and thoughtful their comments and articles are. I remain skeptical that's going to happen anytime soon. How about going from up/down arrows to a dropdown with positive and negative attributes? That would at least start telling you something about what the raters were thinking, and might lead to some more interesting insights.

I doubt that you can really influence the depth of a debate with any voting system. Voting is good for filtering large amounts of information. For everything else we'll have to use our brains for the time being. I agree that fear of getting downvoted is a very bad motivation in a debate. Downvotes are just unnecessary in my view. They only create bad blood and don't help to filter information. I've decided to never downvote.

But, you know, the day I really start to worry about downvotes is when the karma to $$$ conversion rates are announced ;-)

I agree that downvotes are much less useful than upvotes. That's why there are so many restrictions on them. There are no downvotes on submissions; you don't get a downarrow on comments till you get a certain karma threshold; and even then downarrows are missing in some places.

I'm becoming convinced that vote-oriented threaded commenting is harmful to discussion, except of a more limited, conversational kind. I haven't had time to properly think it through, so forgive the sketchiness of the rest of this comment, but my instinct is that this approach favors narrow, isolating, unnatural and oppositional discussion.

Dynamically-ordered threading divorces comments from the context they were written in (i.e. the rest of the thread, and of the natural linearity of conversation), and forces an awkward, artificial pattern of replying. This is a marked contrast to the sort of all-in-this-together, synthesizing discussions that can be found on sites like MetaFilter, and indeed of the natural conversations people enjoy in groups in real life. Voting and non-linear threading encourages and rewards simplistic, emotional, bias-confirming comments, while discouraging and often punishing any other kind of comment, leading to fragmented individualistic comments, which seems to me like the opposite of discussion.

I'm sure there are big problems with traditional linear comment threads, but if you want interesting, intelligent discussion, dynamic threading+voting seems to me the worst solution. (I might add that the generally high quality of comments here reflects the community, rather than the commenting system)

sounds like slashdot 3.0 or another reddit/digg 2.0...

Works for me. I pop by daily and can relate to the community. As it gets bigger, the community will change which will completely change the content. This is a good thing though, even if it ceases to interest me. It's still doing what it should.

I thought the primary purpose of Hacker News was to give yc additional data for their decision making process twice a year. You can tell a lot about a person from their comments here.

It's not the primary purpose, just an additional advantage. The original motivation was simply that we needed it ourselves. We'd funded so many people that it was getting awkward to pass around links by email.

A nice feature would be a view of what stories others have upmodded.

I bet lots of people probably want to know what you would like everyone to see, which fits with the original motivation.

Generally, exposing data is good. A big chunk of hidden data on this site is modding history.

OK. Just in case I ever apply, my insightful comments are a true reflection of myself. My stupid comments were probably made by my evil twin who has the same login and password, but will not be my co-founder.

I just looked through your comments...it appears your evil twin has been a lot more active than you (j/k)

I have been. When he's busy refactoring my mess, I come here.

I think that's why you can't delete comments or edit them after a few minutes... ;)

It would help if you had the lead of the article (or the whole thing) visible in your RSS feed.

Good question. I must admit that I was against the change in the first few days, but slowly i started to learn more through links that related to science, philosophy and even architecture. There are still some parasite links. If you open your house to everyone you can rest assure that some people (who love disorder) will walk in and try to destroy it. Overall I still like HackerNewsNetworks and although I am not a Hacker I can still acquire a tremendous amount of knowledge.

This question doesn't have a yes/no answer. The content changes each day, as does the audience.

So far, I'm here. So it works for me. So far. Ask me again in another month or two.

As far as I know, this is Paul's baby, written in his language and tweaked according to his goals. He's going to tweak it to make the content match what he likes. So far, we seem to like some of the same stuff. Hopefully that pattern will continue.

As a reader, I would like to see:

- Book reviews and recommendations

- Software reviews and recommendations

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