From the most productive ways to keep-up with news and a nice place to hear comments from knowledgeable people about these news.
I learn about new technologies, and sometimes comments from people help me decide next language or technology to explore next.
Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#22To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly. It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth. HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news…
And yet here you are.
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#23To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly. It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth. HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news…
People can assess the ruins for themselves, but I need to correct some factual errors.
1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#24I like it for curation of articles I'd otherwise not likely find (esp. ones that aren't new, which makes it feel like a temporally separate newsfeed). I also like the general distaste for clickbait, markety bullshit,etc. I guess in that respect, it's like all the brains you'd expect from silicon valley with very little of the Kool Aid. ...but mostly I just like seeing people piss & moan about Electron using >50MB of…
Don’t forget those rust vs go threads. 300 comments of people talking past each other ;-)
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#25We've hired a bunch of people from HN over the last 10 years.
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#26It gives me an impression about what is going on in tech in other countries, that would be hard to know about. For example I know I can double my salary if I got to SF, although I may not act on that.
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#27It's slightly more productive than procrastinating on other sites.
"Productive" procrastination is my favorite form of procrastination.
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#28To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly. It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth. HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news…
Do you know where the new elves are?
I believe pg, pmarca and many of the others went from Reddit to HN to Twitter to more private lives.
If the question is "what site in early 2018 most resembles HN of 2006", I believe the answer is Indie Hackers. Its community is open, friendly, genuinely helpful and focused on business.
It's not quite the same since it takes more of a pro-bootstrapper stance, but then again the HN ethos used to be more tilted towards frugality and truly early-stage companies than it now is.
Things will undoubtedly change as they grow, but IH is arguably the finest place on the internet for entrepreneurs.
Re: Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?
#29To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly. It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth. HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news…
People can assess the ruins for themselves, but I need to correct some factual errors. 1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).
1. Which years?
2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars.
Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents.
3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting.
Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether.
#3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed.
My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.