How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

Still new and hard to say, but this might be a good place to meet a more eclectic group: http://denvertoollibrary.org

It's fine to be vigilant about subliminal marketing or secret motives (hailcorporate![1]) but I think in this case, HN is transparent in its goals.

If HN is brainwashing us to redefine "hacker" to suit their needs, what is their end game? HN doesn't have ads. They don't have constant popups nagging us to pay for a subscription. They do have periodic "YC Random Company is hiring" posts (if you consider those "ads"). But they also have the weekly hiring posts from non-YC companies. There are the weekly posts about "basic income" and "minimum wage should be $15" and "programmers should form a union" that routinely make the front page. Those are not topics the money men like to push. Any time a "Uber taxi" thread is posted, the top comments always complain about the "sharing-economy" being a VC-funded scam on society. Lastly, the vast majority of readers will never submit an application to YC so that link is also mostly irrelevant.

In other words, if HN is tricking us with a redefinition of "hacker" to suit their nefarious agenda, what have they gained and what did readers lose?

>It also happens to describe many (if not most) startup founders of the variety being criticized in the article.

Your interpretation of the article is incorrect. The article explains[2] how some startup entrepreneurs with counter-culture tendencies, rebellious attitudes, and subversive agendas can be neutered of their free spirit and be put into the service of entities with money (VCs, Barclay's so-called "hackathon", etc) -- the "yuppies".

The article is criticizing the "yuppies" and not the startup entrepreneurs that might enjoy articles currently on HN front page such as "Reversing NvAPI to Programmatically Overclock Nvidia GPUs" and "Go and Rust – objects without class (2013)"

>the top result has a plug for a startup called "ThriveSmart" and is basically how why some startup uses Rails

I guess one can see whatever they want to see. To me, that article is a Rails article, and the secondary trivia is that the company happens to be ThriveSmart. If that article was written anonymously with no company mentioned, one of the HN commenters would inevitably ask, "where do you work?" and the company name would be revealed in the comments. People try languages, frameworks, databases, and they also tend to work at companies. The company is part of the color of the presentation. If we got manipulated by ThriveSmart exposure 8 years ago, I don't see evidence of it. The other articles on the front page are topics hackers voted up. It doesn't mean every article is a programming article about Lisp or MongoDB.

>- just maybe - folks around here are taking the "hacker" part of "hacker news" too strongly at face value when its YC heritage ought to be warranting at least a small grain of salt, and that a lot may very well have changed in six years.

To proof to me is what types of articles show up on the front page. HN's audience is not all uber-Lisp clones of PG but the intended audience is definitely not the "yuppies" that the article is criticizing. I can't see how anyone can look at the HN front page as a whole and conclude it is designed for "yuppies" instead of "hackers".

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/hailcorporate

[2]I believe there are so many misinterpretations of his thesis because he writes in a very convoluted style but here's an example excerpt of author's criticism of yuppies: "We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones."

And how does one co-opt a culture? What does that even mean? I can see how one might destroy a culture, force a culture into hiding maybe, but co-opt it? That's a fancy way of saying they took our label. That's the thing about label's though. They change meanings over time.

I think the real reason the author and many others are upset is because they thought the "hacker ethos" was going to go mainstream. Then they looked around and realized that what went mainstream wasn't hacking as they saw it, and got upset.

Hackers have always been a minority. We were a minority during the internet revolution. We are minority now. We'll be a minority in the future. Expecting anything else will just result in dashed hopes.

Promoting the startups YCombinator has funded over the years? Promoting YCombinator itself for prospective entrepreneurs looking to get funding? Those are the most obvious ones.

> Lastly, the vast majority of readers will never submit an application to YC so that link is also mostly irrelevant.

In a "vast" majority of even a thousand people, that's still up to a few dozen or so in the minority. And YC would have plenty of motive to encourage that minority to grow, and especially for said growth to have YC in their list of seed funders to apply to because "well they host Hacker News and I'm a Hacker News regular".

Everyone has ulterior motives. Just because YCombinator doesn't explicitly state "Welcome to Hacker News, where we basically cozy up to you in the hopes that you'll apply for seed funding and consultation from us so we can make money off the success of your business" doesn't mean that such an ulterior motive doesn't exist.

I'm probably being excessively critical, of course, and maybe YCombinator really is totally benevolent and running Hacker News out of the goodness of its venture-capitalist heart. It's hard to really know, however, and for that reason I tend to err on the side of caution.

> Your interpretation of the article is incorrect. [...]

How does any of that paragraph invalidate my remark? Just because someone has "counter-culture tendencies, rebellious attitudes, and subversive agendas" doesn't mean that they're suddenly "hackers". You need creative ingenuity and a desire to understand how things work, and those traits don't come automatically with the ones you mention.

> To me, that article is a Rails article, and the secondary trivia is that the company happens to be ThriveSmart.

You're probably right that I'm characterizing that one a bit harshly. To me, though, it reeks a bit of the whole "look at us, we're hip and modern and use Rails so you should totally buy our hip/modern/Railsy product". Especially considering that the product in question happens to be a web development product.

Not that there's something particularly wrong about this - as a buyer of services, the technological implementations do often matter to me, since it gives me a vague idea of whether or not the service I'm buying will be sufficiently-reliable for my needs. It's just that, having been on the other side of that (first-hand experience with companies that want to show off their tech as an advertising tool for prospective customers, talent, etc.), it strikes me as an advertising-first, tech-second article, and I tend to believe it important to recognize such things. Being aware that you're being advertised to is an important part of making wise market decisions; an unawareness of the influence of some subtle bit of advertising can mean the difference between a reasoned evaluation of a product and a gung-ho "this product looks good" based on hard-to-self-identify confirmation biases.

> To proof to me is what types of articles show up on the front page.

As it is to me; on some days the technical outweighs the business, and on other days the business outweighs the technical. As you said, though, one tends to see whatever one wants to see. Perhaps you're looking at HN through rose-colored glasses. Perhaps I'm looking at HN through dirt-colored glasses. It's all a matter of perspective.