Comment by schmoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schmoe | Hacker News Reader

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.

to me Hacker News will always be Startup News =)

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

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.

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.

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.

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