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 sense that having detailed esoteric technical knowledge is no longer the path to success in 2021, and ultimately, hacker news has always been predominately about one thing - how to get rich. The best methods have simply shifted over the last 15 years from being a tech genius to being technically-proficient domain knowledge expert
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
#82Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#83I 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,…
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.)
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#84HN it seems to me is very targeted towards the things that hackers are interested in, which is of course technical content but not exclusively.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#85Programmers aren’t interested in the same programming related topics because everyone is too specialized now. The topics I’d be interested in would be boring to someone else, etc. aside from stuff about elixir which we all geek out on. So general tech topics like dunking on Facebook/apple/surveillance tech and complaining about leetcode job interview headaches get much traction.
As a relatively new user, at first I was curious about every topic but over time I learned to avoid "I built an AI GPU Compiler in Rust" threads because the whole discussion goes way over my head.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#86I wonder if you’re affected by the “notice-dislike” bias the dang [1] often talks about?
Looking at the front page now, there are zero business news stories. At least 15 (half) are straight tech, and a further 8 are tech or science related. Of the remaining 6, one is about Covid-science, one is about tech-politics, one is about culture, one is a YC job listing, one is about HN 15 years ago and the last one is your complaining that there is not enough tech content here.
Sure there’s been a lot of content about Facebook scandals /outages this week, and maybe that’s what you’re focusing on.
But there is a “hide” button on each story, so you can always hide all the stuff that doesn’t interest you and just read the tech content, which always makes up more than half the items in the front page.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
I'm simply not at all interested in political topics here and don't care about the (potential) healthy disagreement. Those threads always derail and spiral to opinions and "us vs. them" mentality.
Never have I found a political comment section here that helped me emerge enlightened. I tried for years, eventually gave up and I'm objectively feeling better because of it.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#88go to /new and upvote the stuff you want to see more of. Surprisingly few people seem to do so, and early voting has quite an effect.
Also under lists in the bottom bar, the second chance pool[0] and invited reposts list[1]. Also, obviously, it's better to post more of the kind of content you want to see, rather than complain about the content you don't like. Also, remember that leaving a comment (even a thoughtful one) without also leaving an upvote acts as an implicit downvote and will eventually trigger the flamewar detector in a thread. It's en…
> Also, remember that leaving a comment (even a thoughtful one) without also leaving an upvote acts as an implicit downvote and will eventually trigger the flamewar detector in a thread.
This happens if the post has at least 20 or 40 comments (I don't remember the number now). Most post in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest die with no of very few comments and upvotes, so most of the times it's not bad to add a comment to an obscure post. Sometimes a post is not good enough for upvoting, but it looks promising and the author may have some interesting insight.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#89Something 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 learn that, even if you have zero interest in politics, politics will still be done to you. And older people learn that they often don't like how that works out, and therefore conclude that they'd better start paying at least some attention to politics, whether they want to or not.
Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
#90Funny, 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…
The HN guideline says "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" can be on-topic. In my opinion this summary is pretty much correct and also useless, because hackers seem to be curious about almost everything. I am interested in politics after all. But I don't think HN is or can be a good venue for political discourses. Of course some links can be very political and yet marginally technological due to the overreaching influence of technology over society, but there are annoyingly political links that I used to flag immediately nowadays.
I'm also concerned that the front page seems to prefer topics that only make sense in USA and especially California. For example I found following links posted today to be especially domestic:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806363 The Off-Grid Laws of Every State in America
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809517 Tesla’s Texas Move Is Latest Sign of California Losing Tech Grip
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812137 America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter
Yeah, you can still argue that they somehow gratifify someone's intellectual curiosity. For me they don't.