This was from 2013. The general climate here has turned pretty hostile to startups since then. The prevailing advice here is now to land a FAAMG job and slack off with a high standard of living, rather than slaving away at a startup to boost someone else’s capital. What remains is people sharing their side projects, going off-topic and wasting their time one way or another.
> The general climate here has turned pretty hostile to startups since then. The prevailing advice here is now to land a FAAMG job and slack off with a high standard of living
Some times I stumble upon really old HN threads in Google searches and end up missing the quality of old HN discourse. It was never perfect, of course. Nor is the modern version without upsides, as there are often good pieces of wisdom if you sift through enough noise in the comments.
However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts. It’s also starting to feel weirdly disconnected from reality in the way that the extremes of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have become echo chambers after consuming non-stop bad news. It’s like people read so many outrage tech stories here that they forget there is an upside to the tech industry.
Big Tech hangs in a weird balance where we’re simultaneously supposed to hate and distrust FAANG companies but also at the same time we’re told to seek out FAANG jobs where we can maximize compensation.
The key to enjoying HN is to ignore any thread remotely related to politics, FAANG, social media, economics (where the comments are actually just about politics), drugs, or open-source drama.
Sadly, the most interesting content links (great blog posts, writings, knowledge, new projects, and so on) generally get fewer upvotes than outrage topics. I try to make a point of actively upvoting the content I want to see here every time I visit.
>However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts. It’s also starting to feel weirdly disconnected from reality in the way that the extremes of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have become echo chambers after consuming non-stop bad news. It’s like people read so many outrage tech stories here that they forget there is an upside to the tech industry.
I dunno, I think the current atmosphere is more closely aligned with the zeitgeist of society writ large than it was previously.
That famed entrepreneurial optimism was born of a belief that technology is inherently good, and that startups can change the world.
The veil has been lifted and we see that most startups, internet startups in particular, exist to provide lucrative exits for the owners while abusing their users by harvesting data and selling ads.
The promise of a tech-led utopia is a hollow farce. It's a facade for the surveillance dystopia that big Internet companies are creating.
With every iteration, user experience takes a back seat to developer convenience, and devices are more powerful yet feel sluggish because of the mountains of shitty abstraction layers piled on. The companies that wield inordinate power are giant faceless corporations acting with impunity and whose decisions have no recourse.
Being a tech user is an exercise in frustration. The world sucks and Tech is making it worse.
> However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts
Isn't that a direct reflection of the current state of the tech world? Since the 00's, it has morphed from a rather hacker-friendly, digital far-west into a locked-down plutocracy dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations, whose end-goal are quite often to squeeze every single last bit of personal information or other valuable commodity they can out of, typically, misinformed users.
E.g., despite all the folklore, I feel much better toward 00's ‶Linux is cancer″ MS and their Windows 2000 than toward 2020's ‶We <3 Linux″ MS that just spy on me through Windows 10 and put ads in my start menu.
Similarly, I prefer the 90's ‶we're making expensive and original computers″ Apple to the 2020's ‶we will scan all the photos on your device″ Apple.
And it's not to single these two out, they're just the first examples I'm thinking of. All in all, I just believe the whole digital world is much more hostile now than it used to be, which would, at least partially, account for the growing apathy, cynicism and defiance in the community – it's hard to feel any different when every other week brings a new personal data leak, spyware scandal or privacy-infringement affair, be it corporate- or state-sponsored.
I haven't been browsing this site for more than like a year, but have found it one of the places on the internet where political discourse seems to be relatively tame and good-faith for the most part. I've also learned a lot from the blog posts you mentioned and really knowledgeable comments on them.
Is it really worse now?
The reduction in optimism may be related to the increased experience with the topics discussed? For example the internet boom of 2000 was caused by hyper-optimism, then people learned to be more moderate and Internet really took off. By comparison, the generation of 2003-2005 was less optimistic, but not in a bad way.
Not everyone is the same as you. I enjoy immensely reading HN posts and comments related to politics, FAANG, social media, economics (where the comments are actually just about politics), drugs, or open-source drama.
I also like interesting content links (great blog posts, writings, knowledge, new projects, and so on). I don’t get this mix elsewhere and it’s why I come here. Are you in the right community?
My account is now older than a decade so I guess I'm an OG here. (crazy) There's definitely been a big shift over the years. But, I feel like this is just the general state of the world right now.
The entire industry back then was so much more optimistic.
Politics should be interesting to a programmer if one can write a program or use data to do something useful. (or talk about doing that) You have to force the conversation in that direction. Like for a chemist everything is about chemistry. They know its not but pretending sure makes things a lot more interesting.
Or we're just getting older. Software tech has become less of a disruptive novelty. Younger generations are entering the scene with different ideals. They desire meaningful capitalism (in a political sense). This also brings new opportunities.
This is my favorite online place to waste time, after all. And yes, I've given up any dreams of starting my own thing. You pretty much just described me, except not FAAMG (but I am happy where I'm at).
I don't mind this description at all (there's a freedom in giving up even just the dream of the hustle).
When the people who had been laughing at Microsoft for years as being a washed up has-been came to the realization that it currently has a valuation of over $2 trillion and is still growing.
4chan often had(maybe still has, dunno haven't checked up on anons for a while) a fantastic feel for irony, satire and parody(including of themselves). People unfairly disregard the true internet comedy gold that 4chan has gifted to society.
4chan is the single most hostile website to me and people like me. People can't even watch porn there without first stating how much they hate black people.
I don't doubt there are interesting discussions to be had there (it is filled with nerds after all) but the userbase is very clear about who is welcome there.
> A website where unsuccessful entrepreneurs with egos waste time browsing articles and websites, created by wanna-be entrepreneurs with even bigger egos who are trying to build a following.
> A place unknown to financially successful entrepreneurs.
I always thought the bulk of HN was not entrepreneurs but employed engineers, curious minds, etc. Have I been deluded all this time?
HN is part of Y Combinator (obvious from the URL) so there has always been a bias toward entrepreneurship and startups.
In practice it tends to be mostly content from bored engineers. Any social website like HN is inherently biased toward people with the most time to burn, because they have the most time to post. It turns out a lot of modern engineering jobs have a lot of free time at your desk in front of a computer, so those are the people who post here most.
The actual entrepreneurs are usually too busy to post too much on HN so they aren’t heavily represented. Not absent, of course, but it’s hard to compete with the people who seem to have infinite free time for social discussions.
HN can be interesting, but it’s really difficult at times to separate the signal from the noise. There’s a lot of noise.
A browser extension with some custom filtering rules could be handy. I'd love to never open another blog post from someone who thinks finding out that becoming internet famous for two days is bad for you is some kind of revolutionary insight and that everyone needs to hear about how stressful it was to be tweeted at a lot.
Indeed. There is missing representation in conversations here that make those absences conspicuous. You can see a similar effect on, for example, a company Slack channel, and figure out which groups of employees are having the same conversation on a private channel. Nothing wrong with it unless the members of the side group are obliged to participate in general conversation, and they aren’t here.
Nobody who has ever laid eyes on Bookface could possibly believe that it's a replacement for HN. It's a very different scene, more like Craigslist than Reddit. It would be weird to "hang out" there. Nobody has "fled" HN to Bookface.
Last I checked, the rate of participation of YC alumni on HN had been stable for many years. It was a couple years ago that I ran the numbers, but I doubt that it has changed much since then.
One thing i noticed is that most of the conversation here feels alien to me.
I think this is because most of the people here are living in California and they seem to have a very particular world view not always compatible or even undertandable for anyone from any other place.
I used to enjoy this website in like, 2015/16 i think, now the topics are not even tech related anymore.
Fewer than 10% of HN users are in the Bay Area. I don't know what the number for California is but I'd be surprised if it were above 15%. Half of the userbase is outside the U.S. People make a lot of false assumptions about the demographics here.
HN has always had a mix of topics. That hasn't changed.
Interesting, what is the next highest cohort, though? 10% may still be enough to dominate conversation if its a big enough plurality.
This is a vote-driven website, and while maybe less prone to the bandwagon effects on, say, reddit, it still happens that if a group of people begin to vote up a post or comment, it will have strong momentum to gain further votes.
I've seen you post this verbatim comment before and it always feels a little like a shallow dismissal.
Maybe its worth someone taking the HN Kaggle dataset and doing a keyword analysis. Demographics are one thing, the topics themselves should be studied.
This is a reflection of how engineers have become aware of the ethical and political effects of their work. To HN's credit the non-technical discussions are of high quality, in general.
From a purely technical standpoint, HN remains the best forum for discovery of new projects and giving feedback to FAANG. (M not so much).
I mean, it is actually comprehensible but you know, California tech workers live in a monopoly money bubble and they think they know something about how the world works. Also they think that their own "culture" and leftist values are relevant to everywhere in the world even if they cant even point places on a map.
I'm neither part of the tech nor startup scene. I'm happy to see more variety in the content, as long as it's high quality and has interesting comments.
To be frank, work is work and I don't care so much to read about it. I care even less about drama at other companies.
> SV's political culture (and largely America's culture) is being exported to the world at an ever increasing pace
The valley's culture has little in common the the rest of America's. It "exporting" its culture to the rest of the US as much as it is anywhere else, though I'd personally characterize it more as imperialism than exporting.
Or the the history of how oracle created a world wide conspiracy to impose Java has a standard , and if they hadn’t done so Haskell/ Clojure / ( Anything that’s not OOP) would be running everything from Operating System to Back End.
Hacker News = everything that came after my adolescence is terrible and everyone needs to know that.
Twitter: A rabid pack of shrieking, pitchfork wielding neo-Marxist SJWs ruining people's lives with impunity.
Facebook: their boomer Neo-Nazi anti-vaxxer parents captured by CIA mind-control and agitprop.
Youtube: nothing but low-effort monetized clickbait and also leftist propaganda, because Google.
Instagram: also nothing but low-effort monetized clickbait, but also porn.
Tiktok: CCP propaganda but also for some reason we really like it, at least until the novelty wears off.
Reddit: just mouth-breathing imbeciles posting cat pictures and memes. Good thing we're better than them, and point out that fact to ourselves at every opportunity.
The entire rest of the web: shit, except for 4chan.
Movies: shit.
TV: shit.
Music: shit.
TFA: never bothered reading it, but I'll assume this rant about cultural marxism is relevant.
Books: Do they even still make physical books? I thought paper went obsolete in 2019.
Science: lies, damn lies and statistics.
Media: lies, damn lies and more lies.
Other people: hell.
Emoji: BLIND RAGE
Technology: What is with all these buttons and blinking lights, what does any of this even do? Why would anyone need anything more than a Lisp REPL in a bare terminal?
Code: JAVASCRIPT DELENDA EST. Everything but Rust and Lisp are shit and PHP literally gives you brain cancer.
Society: Ted Kaczynski was right about everything. Burn it all down and return to monke.
Hacker News itself: used to be good, but now it's turning into Reddit. Who let these people in here? I bet half of them have never even written a compiler.
Fair or not, but more and more lately, when searching the web for a useful take on a framework, library, language, or anything else related to computers, I put in a "site:news.ycombinator.com". This way I skip past the multiple pages of blogspam, advertising (disguised or otherwise), and people copying each other's top-ten lists, and might actually see a thoughtful comment or someone's real experience.
Readit News
Some times I stumble upon really old HN threads in Google searches and end up missing the quality of old HN discourse. It was never perfect, of course. Nor is the modern version without upsides, as there are often good pieces of wisdom if you sift through enough noise in the comments.
However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts. It’s also starting to feel weirdly disconnected from reality in the way that the extremes of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have become echo chambers after consuming non-stop bad news. It’s like people read so many outrage tech stories here that they forget there is an upside to the tech industry.
Big Tech hangs in a weird balance where we’re simultaneously supposed to hate and distrust FAANG companies but also at the same time we’re told to seek out FAANG jobs where we can maximize compensation.
The key to enjoying HN is to ignore any thread remotely related to politics, FAANG, social media, economics (where the comments are actually just about politics), drugs, or open-source drama.
Sadly, the most interesting content links (great blog posts, writings, knowledge, new projects, and so on) generally get fewer upvotes than outrage topics. I try to make a point of actively upvoting the content I want to see here every time I visit.
I dunno, I think the current atmosphere is more closely aligned with the zeitgeist of society writ large than it was previously.
That famed entrepreneurial optimism was born of a belief that technology is inherently good, and that startups can change the world.
The veil has been lifted and we see that most startups, internet startups in particular, exist to provide lucrative exits for the owners while abusing their users by harvesting data and selling ads.
The promise of a tech-led utopia is a hollow farce. It's a facade for the surveillance dystopia that big Internet companies are creating.
With every iteration, user experience takes a back seat to developer convenience, and devices are more powerful yet feel sluggish because of the mountains of shitty abstraction layers piled on. The companies that wield inordinate power are giant faceless corporations acting with impunity and whose decisions have no recourse.
Being a tech user is an exercise in frustration. The world sucks and Tech is making it worse.
Isn't that a direct reflection of the current state of the tech world? Since the 00's, it has morphed from a rather hacker-friendly, digital far-west into a locked-down plutocracy dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations, whose end-goal are quite often to squeeze every single last bit of personal information or other valuable commodity they can out of, typically, misinformed users.
E.g., despite all the folklore, I feel much better toward 00's ‶Linux is cancer″ MS and their Windows 2000 than toward 2020's ‶We <3 Linux″ MS that just spy on me through Windows 10 and put ads in my start menu.
Similarly, I prefer the 90's ‶we're making expensive and original computers″ Apple to the 2020's ‶we will scan all the photos on your device″ Apple.
And it's not to single these two out, they're just the first examples I'm thinking of. All in all, I just believe the whole digital world is much more hostile now than it used to be, which would, at least partially, account for the growing apathy, cynicism and defiance in the community – it's hard to feel any different when every other week brings a new personal data leak, spyware scandal or privacy-infringement affair, be it corporate- or state-sponsored.
Deleted Comment
The entire industry back then was so much more optimistic.
Personally, I only browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
I don't mind this description at all (there's a freedom in giving up even just the dream of the hustle).
Netflix has never been an aspirational overlord type company like the others.
Even though Microsoft is no longer at its peak, its dual presence via OS and cloud keep it in sustainable wannabe overlord position.
Thread archive: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317
Snapchat for your production data.
I don't doubt there are interesting discussions to be had there (it is filled with nerds after all) but the userbase is very clear about who is welcome there.
They're also virulently antisemitic.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
> Additionally, the following words MAY NOT be used in variable or function names: master, slave, he, him, his.
Prescient.
That page is actually pretty funny here and there.
I just came from the “EFF writes a letter to Tim Cook about CSAM” article. I guess we’ve confirmed the parody.
Deleted Comment
I mean...
> A place unknown to financially successful entrepreneurs.
I always thought the bulk of HN was not entrepreneurs but employed engineers, curious minds, etc. Have I been deluded all this time?
In practice it tends to be mostly content from bored engineers. Any social website like HN is inherently biased toward people with the most time to burn, because they have the most time to post. It turns out a lot of modern engineering jobs have a lot of free time at your desk in front of a computer, so those are the people who post here most.
The actual entrepreneurs are usually too busy to post too much on HN so they aren’t heavily represented. Not absent, of course, but it’s hard to compete with the people who seem to have infinite free time for social discussions.
HN can be interesting, but it’s really difficult at times to separate the signal from the noise. There’s a lot of noise.
That's because YC founders fled to Bookface many years ago, YC's internal Hacker News.
A YC founder once saw me browsing HN and said "Huh, are you on Bookface?"
I realized later that he'd never been to HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389362
Deleted Comment
No, I meant Bookface, YC's internal clone of Hacker News.
I think this is because most of the people here are living in California and they seem to have a very particular world view not always compatible or even undertandable for anyone from any other place.
I used to enjoy this website in like, 2015/16 i think, now the topics are not even tech related anymore.
HN has always had a mix of topics. That hasn't changed.
This is a vote-driven website, and while maybe less prone to the bandwagon effects on, say, reddit, it still happens that if a group of people begin to vote up a post or comment, it will have strong momentum to gain further votes.
I've seen you post this verbatim comment before and it always feels a little like a shallow dismissal.
Maybe its worth someone taking the HN Kaggle dataset and doing a keyword analysis. Demographics are one thing, the topics themselves should be studied.
From a purely technical standpoint, HN remains the best forum for discovery of new projects and giving feedback to FAANG. (M not so much).
I'd love to know.
I will get banned if i talk more.
To be frank, work is work and I don't care so much to read about it. I care even less about drama at other companies.
SV's political culture (and largely America's culture) is being exported to the world at an ever increasing pace: https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...
Edit: Of course downvotes!
The valley's culture has little in common the the rest of America's. It "exporting" its culture to the rest of the US as much as it is anywhere else, though I'd personally characterize it more as imperialism than exporting.
Upvote anything with Rust, Go, SQLite, or Haskell in the title; use the words “orthogonal” and “Pareto” as much as possible.
Hate SPAs, Docker, crypto, and someone using the word “crypto” for cryptocurrency.
That damn Oracle Conspiracy, and OOP !
Twitter: A rabid pack of shrieking, pitchfork wielding neo-Marxist SJWs ruining people's lives with impunity.
Facebook: their boomer Neo-Nazi anti-vaxxer parents captured by CIA mind-control and agitprop.
Youtube: nothing but low-effort monetized clickbait and also leftist propaganda, because Google.
Instagram: also nothing but low-effort monetized clickbait, but also porn.
Tiktok: CCP propaganda but also for some reason we really like it, at least until the novelty wears off.
Reddit: just mouth-breathing imbeciles posting cat pictures and memes. Good thing we're better than them, and point out that fact to ourselves at every opportunity.
The entire rest of the web: shit, except for 4chan.
Movies: shit.
TV: shit.
Music: shit.
TFA: never bothered reading it, but I'll assume this rant about cultural marxism is relevant.
Books: Do they even still make physical books? I thought paper went obsolete in 2019.
Science: lies, damn lies and statistics.
Media: lies, damn lies and more lies.
Other people: hell.
Emoji: BLIND RAGE
Technology: What is with all these buttons and blinking lights, what does any of this even do? Why would anyone need anything more than a Lisp REPL in a bare terminal?
Code: JAVASCRIPT DELENDA EST. Everything but Rust and Lisp are shit and PHP literally gives you brain cancer.
Society: Ted Kaczynski was right about everything. Burn it all down and return to monke.
Your stupid project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Hacker News itself: used to be good, but now it's turning into Reddit. Who let these people in here? I bet half of them have never even written a compiler.
Don't forget Julia!