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Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

news.ycombinator.com

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Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

#1

Post by doiwin »

Does anybody else have the feeling HN somehow became "programmer news" along the way?

I remember when it was "startup news" and mostly for startup founders. Then it became "Hacker News" and about "Anything that good hackers would find interesting".

Not sure what everyones definition of a "good hacker" is. But somehow I would expect more outlandish topics then all the discussions about corporate software jobs and tools we see.

Is there a smaller communitiy somewhere, where less "normies" with normal jobs hang out and more founders and makers? Maybe a community where you have to show what you are building before you can enter?

Re: Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

#2

Post by pavlov »

This is a new inversion to me. The common complaint used to be that HN has become too much of a startup hustler site and strayed away from its programming roots, as in: “Back in the good old days you’d have the front page full of Erlang articles only”

Re: Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

#3

Post by PaulHoule »

When I look at Hacker News at different times I see a different balance of what gets to the home page. When I wrote this, for instance,

https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/

I was infuriated that the HN homepage was choked with articles about Apple products. I built an anti-Apple rule into this

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

but it was really a mistake because (1) my classifier learned it anyway and (2) Apple articles fell out of favor. At that time Apple had done a round of product announcements that I was thought were underwhelming. Soon Apple articles fell back to a reasonable rate and I found later product announcements from Apple more interesting.

So it is the same thing with Rust, cryptocurrency, "cancel culture" and every other topic that gets popular for a while.

Re: Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

#8

Post by kbrannigan »

It’s collective wisdom has evolved. It’s a periodical thing.

Some days it’s politics, science, tech news, Flame wars about the best language or frameworks.

HN hated legacy mature tech like : PHP + MYSQL, in favor of cutting edge or niche tech.

“If the average joe can easily code and deploy it” it’s bad

This has changed, although you’ll see JS folks talking about server side rendering like it’s a new invention

Re: Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

#9

Post by qez »

> Does anybody else have the feeling HN somehow became "programmer news" along the way?

I think it's clear from Paul Graham's essays that he always basically defined "hacking" as just programming. He then created Hacker News.

> Then it became "Hacker News" and about "Anything that good hackers would find interesting".

Well, yes.

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

*What to Submit*

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

> But somehow I would expect more outlandish topics then all the discussions about corporate software jobs and tools we see.

Well, I don't know, if you're interested in that you can submit such things and upvote them. But I wouldn't necessarily expect founders to post more off the wall stuff.

> Is there a smaller communitiy somewhere, where less "normies" with normal jobs hang out and more founders and makers?

Yes, https://lobste.rs/

Re: Has Hacker New Become Programmer News?

#10

Post by paulryanrogers »

> Maybe a community where you have to show what you are building before you can enter?

What a curious filter. Personally I'm not a fan of gatekeeping like that. Unless it was very carefully overseen it could become really toxic. Though I suppose the value is that it would filter out folks who talk a big game with little to show for it.

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