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It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

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241–250 of 295 posts

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#241
I wouldn’t describe it as business news, more like mainstream news. Over the last six months or so, I have noticed a massive increase in the downvoting of unpopular opinions. Before you had to be deliberately belligerent to get flagged or downvoted. Now it’s more just saying something the slightest bit controversial.

This is how Reddit operates and I am sad to see it taking over Hn too.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t really align with the reality. HN’s audience is not heavily concentrated in Silicon Vally or the U.S. - less than 10% of the audience is based around Silicon Valley [1]. Most discussion about Silicon Valley companies, individuals and culture is critical and negative. At any time there are multiple articles about “obscure hacking” topics on the front page. Right now there are 10, by my count - though othe…

Discussion fora are usually dominated by a minority. You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne, while you learn the people, areas and streets of SF by name. HN is a megaphone for globalizing the SV culture.

> You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne, while you learn the people, areas and streets of SF by name.

Is that even true? I feel (as in: likely a misperception) that I learn more about life in Berlin these days on hn than from real life, and I have visited many times, trains run twice an hour and I have friends and family there. Sure, there's the occasional council level politics topics about some SV thing but that's rare.

Plenty of platforms offer hard focus on a topic, for any topic, no scarcity on that front. The achievement of hn is broadness of scopewithout losing identity. It's great.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#246
post #219

Something 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…

So where do the 18 year old hackers chat these days?

discord.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#247

Software is becoming less and less of a tech industry and more and more commoditized. Very little innovation in the past 5-10 years. Very few successful companies during that time have come about by having incredibly innovative and novel technology - almost all are simply using run of the mill, commoditized technology to solve business problems that they have large domain knowledge of. Given this, it makes total sens…

im not sure i disagree, but i have a few points that i believe do fit the timeframe:

* openAIs text engine

* teslas driver assists

* serverless workers as ga in cloud

* container instances as ga in the cloud

* .net core, blazor?

* cloudflares infrastructural innovations

* next.js or whatever the latest framework is called (was it nuxt?)

* webassembly ga?

* rust ga?

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A large organic hass avocado is between $2 and $4. This is pretty outrageous. In the 1990s, we would shop for avocados in Mission district Mexican grocery stores, where they would average four for a $1. People don't realize that everyone had an abundant number of avocados in every Bay Area home back then because they were so cheap and plentiful. Something happened, and by the end of the 1990s, the drug cartels had…

To be honest, the cartels rule and own everything in Mexico (maybe not always directly, but their influence is enormous), so I don't see why avocados are special in this regard.

> I don't see why avocados are special in this regard

They are special in the sense that the cartels went after the avocado industry in the 1990s due to the rise of synthetic opioids, which hurt their drug profits. Both avocados and heroin are primarily produced in Michoacan state. According to some sources, the avocado industry became more profitable for the cartels than heroin.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#249
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a function of age, but of size. As Slashdot got larger, it attracted more people who didn't or couldn't talk about those things.

Larger? I feel like Slashdot has shrunk tremendously over the last 10 years and I believe the shift to politics is the main reason. I have screenshot that I took a couple of years ago where the entire "Most discussed" section had the word "trump" in it. Every single one. That was the tipping point for me. Maybe the site is larger now than it was a decade ago but it sure doesn't feel like it.

Usually when people talk about the rise and fall of Slashdot they are not referring to anything that happened on that domain in 2011 or later. Slashdot was great while it broadened in scope, but the wide scope made it vulnerable to both even more open competition (e.g. reddit, where absolutely every niche can have its niche) end more specific specializations (e.g. kuro5hin, for a few years), leaving the site with a broadness it could not really fill anymore.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's maybe fifty cents a slice if you make it yourself

A large organic hass avocado is between $2 and $4. You need at least half of one to make good avocado toast. If the loaf of bread cost you $5, and makes 20 slices, that's a base cost of $2.25.

I don't pay over a buck for them. And a loaf of bread is two bucks.

https://jacksmarket.net/weekly-ad/

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