This is the social media arm of a for-profit startup incubator business. The "hacker" is just corny branding, man
It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
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Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#72Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like. It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers! Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead…
> Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.
As I age I am less interested in business topics, and more interested in technological advancements
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#73It's dominated by mainstream, intelligentsia-approved narratives.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#74I think as reddit continued to decline, more people here became interested in debating politics, societal stuff since there was no other "serious" place for it. I wish some of that stuff wasn't here, since it takes away from discussions in other threads. But (and I hope dang sees this) occasionally when HN "strays" away from tech it's absolutely brilliant. There's tons of discussion here on some health issues, diets,…
>But (and I hope dang sees this) occasionally when HN "strays" away from tech it's absolutely brilliant. There's tons of discussion here on some health issues, diets, stuff like that
I've found the opposite. While there is enough knowledge about computing to keep the discussion informed and aligned with reality, outside that field we're mostly laymen. See the various UFO threads, the peculiar support for Wim Hof, the contentious COVID discussions... The health discussions in particular remind me a lot like the enthusiasm for polyphasic sleep 10-15 years ago, or the more recent enthusiasm for microdosing LSD.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#75Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like. It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers! Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead…
I don't think it's a matter of becoming bored, but about being able to better discern the truth.
Eg: Most new things will be completely irrelevant in a couple of years.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be interested in a wrapper around hacker news that lets you filter to only technical discussions? (I'm already playing with wrapping it so that probably isn't hard to add)
If I could filter all politics out of hacker news that would be great. the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots" I have filtered a lot of politics on twitter by blocking prominent politicians and mute words.
> the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"
Does such a broad brush add to the discussion?
Disagreement can be healthy. I'd say the varied political and philosophical perspectives of HN and Slashdot contributed a lot to changing my worldview. (Hopefully for the better, though we're all still learning.)
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#77Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree, " I'd like to see conversations about s…
Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy. There has always been a strong anti-authoritarian ethos to hacker culture, one where personal privacy and bodily autonomy and the right to encryption were intrinsically at odds with corporate and government attempts to control and surveil, and I hope that doesn't go away.
> Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.
Well, yes, but usually from an aesthetic perspective, rather than a moralistic one. E.g. bad laws and cronyism being seen as ugly hacks and misfeatures on what could be a beautiful and elegant system of law; the cleverness of computer intrusion being more important than its consequences; the Internet (Tor, cryptocurrency, whatever) "routing around damage" — i.e. systems of law that seek to constrain behavior — and this being seen as "natural and inevitable" in the same way one might prescribe no moral agency to carnivorous animals killing their prey; etc.
Communities that start out full of hacker-aesthetes, seem to invariably shift to being full of engineer-moralists. HN wasn't purely a hacker-aesthete community when it started — it was tempered with a good number of other types of people — but they're certainly even more rare here now.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#78It is obvious to anyone who has been here for a while that this community is in decline, in the sense that it has less depth, less quirkiness, and less 'real' diversity of opinion (although dang does a good job of stemming the tide). The 'hivemind' has emerged here to squash contrasting positions.
The funny thing is, no one thinks they are a part of this emergent 'hivemind' but the end result is the same.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#79I think as reddit continued to decline, more people here became interested in debating politics, societal stuff since there was no other "serious" place for it. I wish some of that stuff wasn't here, since it takes away from discussions in other threads. But (and I hope dang sees this) occasionally when HN "strays" away from tech it's absolutely brilliant. There's tons of discussion here on some health issues, diets,…
>But (and I hope dang sees this) occasionally when HN "strays" away from tech it's absolutely brilliant. There's tons of discussion here on some health issues, diets, stuff like that I've found the opposite. While there is enough knowledge about computing to keep the discussion informed and aligned with reality, outside that field we're mostly laymen. See the various UFO threads, the peculiar support for Wim Hof, the…
Well, I love Wim Hof breathing (and it helped me when I had Covid, and helps with HRV and energy levels), and now take Vitamin D, glycine, Zinc, and other stuff that seemed to help me a lot. On top of that, if you've ever dealt with any chronic illness (GERD in my case), you'll find the wealth of anecdotal, n=1 info posted in HN comments is much, much more helpful than anything you'd find anywhere else. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. There are some discussions you could have on reddit, or any other site, but the discussion quality would be 5-10% what it would be here, simply because of the different audience. People here tend to have more life experience, and I'm grateful for the scraps of wisdom that get shared in non-tech conversations here.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#80I wish it was more business (and tech) news oriented.
All I see lately is a lot of culture war, partisanship, 'intersectionality' and other things they were rarer before the Trump era.
I remember a time when people were getting downvoted for suggesting that maybe, Airbnb and Uber should follow local laws, fast forward 5 years and it's a cultural battlefield...
I miss the time when we were just yelling at each other over the use of singletons, or whether POST or PUT were idempotent...