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

news.ycombinator.com

271–280 of 295 posts

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

#271
50 years since building my first heathkit radio with Dad on the kitchen table and I still love reading about the bleeding edge of silicon, algorithms, philosophy, development ideas, and anything else we all churn up. I appreciate the group effort behind HN and rely on YOU for a focus on things that really matter.

Thank you for all the hard work

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

#272
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't say Hitler was an abusive politician?

Abusive, yes. Abusive politician, not in the context of what he started with.

Defending Hitler is a weird flex but ok

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

#273
I missed this thread completely, but these perceptions have basically been around as long as HN has. I don't believe the community is less technical than it used to be; if anything, the opposite, actually.

If you or anyone wants to see more posts of type X, the best thing to do is to find interesting links of type X and submit them.

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

#274
Probably something to do with a lot of us becoming pawns in silicon valley's carefully orchestrated theater. Maybe combined with mass media grappling harder and harder for people's attention as their precious TV dies out. Looks like to be quite potent resulting in people posting a lot about politics and business.

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

#275
post #29

Yes. Posts like "How to make $1 million with embarrassingly little work" are always going to make it to the HN frontpage. Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping? Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Somet…

HN has always had those sorts of articles, though you're caricaturing it a bit. More like "how I made $X in $Y months with my $(SaaS|eBook)".

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

#276
post #29

Yes. Posts like "How to make $1 million with embarrassingly little work" are always going to make it to the HN frontpage. Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping? Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Somet…

The other day I saw a post here asking people about how much they had saved and what their age was. A completely pointless dick-measuring thing, that I thought I wouldn’t find even in the likes of Reddit. I follow HN on and off, usually just lurking, since 2017. But lately I’ve noticed a surprising amount of people humble bragging about their crypto wallets, their no-work-million-dollars startup, and how good their l…

Those posts have also always been with us. We bury them when we see them, because the interest is not, as you point out, intellectual.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#277
post #274

Probably something to do with a lot of us becoming pawns in silicon valley's carefully orchestrated theater. Maybe combined with mass media grappling harder and harder for people's attention as their precious TV dies out. Looks like to be quite potent resulting in people posting a lot about politics and business.

I can tell you for sure that the moderators here don't give a shit about "silicon valley's carefully orchestrated theater" or any other orchestrated theater. The only orchestration is trying to have a site with the most (intellectually) interesting articles. People disagree a lot about what's intellectually interesting—that's all that's going on here.

If you or anyone finds other things more intellectually interesting, you're very welcome to post more of them, or look for them in /newest and upvote more of them.

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

#278
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall thrust, but I certainly wouldn't have picked those examples. The diet threads just make me roll my eyes and think "Californians will believe anything"! (Sorry California, I know you don't all fit the stereotype.)

Have you had avocado toast? It’ll rock your world, seriously.

[deleted]

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the elected officials & appointees actually cared for something like this, it would have existed already. Ultimately, the problem is that the "res publica" is not actually for the public. The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.

Indeed, such an improvement would have to be insisted upon by the demos . But the res publica has NEVER been a democracy at any point. What we have is a gnarly attempt to scale from the individual to the group, the singular to the plural, the integer to the list(integer). Hence my comment: technically savvier people like those who visit this site badly need to give this res publica an enema.

Engineers of all people should know that scaling is best achieved by distributed systems.

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

#280
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the elected officials & appointees actually cared for something like this, it would have existed already. Ultimately, the problem is that the "res publica" is not actually for the public. The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.

>The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic. What does "meaningfully" mean, in this context?

It means that votes taken by the representative actually advance the specific interests of their constituents.

The problem is that, for this to be the case, constituents must have a working communication channel. But when you have a single representative ostensibly speaking for millions (or even tens of thousands) of people, any such channel is quickly overwhelmed, and becomes mostly a token thing.

Council democracy tries to solve it by ensuring that, at every level, each delegate speaks for a relatively small group of people - small enough that it can regularly assemble to keep the delegate under control at all times.

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