I know that "tech" is all about startups and business success, but I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here.
Of course HN is run by YC so there will always be the mod posts about startups and jobs, but it seems the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology.
Just a personal thought, would like to hear if others also have a similar perception.
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.
We're moving up on the abstraction ladder, and as hacker news has always had an early adopter audience, focus is shifting here first.
Assuming these trends are highly correlated with the Kondratieff cycle, I expect a new trend to emerge about a decade from now. My best bet is focus will shift deep into the implementation again, but now in another context (Maybe on edge devices, data/code floating in the void, more decentralized, ...).
I've put my money where my mouth is, and my personal bet is on interactive 3D, as 3D capable devices are becoming more of a commodity and the current generation of youth (future buyers) will be a very technically literate audience that has grown up playing games and being connected 24/7.
Maybe I should send myself a reminder about this post in 10 years from now; curious to see what will have emerged by then on this site...
When problems are solved by three or more people working together in a Zoom meeting, "making technology" becomes a lot less like being a hacker.
And a lot more boring regular business suit stuff becomes part of the conversation.
That means the time is now! The changes and innovations that we are looking for are being formed right now! I can't wait to see what comes out of all this. Sure the HN community is getting a little homogenized but the creator of the next big thing is likely already here among us, and they're unknowingly depending on us to seed them with the concepts and values that we care about.
* 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?
Discussion here is also still very high quality. I find it remarkable.
Any time someone hits out with a pun or whatever comment someone will say "this isn't reddit" and the comment is made hard to read - over time I have to imagine that has helped keep it from becoming reddit
Of course I am also burying the lede a bit. Paid and dedicated (I think?) moderators is an absolute key factor too
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, stuff like that, where I would never have found such good discussion (even the anecdotal evidence is interesting and useful) and where you can really walk away being better off from having read it. If that means tolerating the occasional thread about how appropriate politics is in the workplace, or how bad everything is for mental health, I'm more than happy to keep coming back here for that.
edit: by the way, I'd be quite interested in what a thread like this posted 8 years ago would look like. Wouldn't be surprised if people were saying this website was "going downhill" too back then. I think as long as the 12-18 only-cares-about-memes demographic stays on reddit, HN will stay just fine.
I've found the opposite. While there is enough knowledge about computing to keep the discussion informed and aligned with reality, outside that field we're mostly laymen. See the various UFO threads, the peculiar support for Wim Hof, the contentious COVID discussions... The health discussions in particular remind me a lot like the enthusiasm for polyphasic sleep 10-15 years ago, or the more recent enthusiasm for microdosing LSD.
N of 1, WHM helped me with a number of issues that I had thought were just going to be part of life. I don't think it deserves to be lumped in with "various UFO threads", or implied to be "unaligned with reality".
As for "contentious COVID discussion"; do you not remember when the lab leak theory was banned from Facebook and Twitter, for over a year, with millions of posts removed? This was one of the few places with morsels of quality discussion. The topic has much to be "contentious" about, that's not HN's fault.
The front page is the way it is because the regulars and the regular content have reached an equilibrium.
More so that we all don’t miss out on those new opportunities!
A social media site is only as good as its users and sadly the average person has a short attention span, poor reading comprehension and a preference for anecdote and feelings over data and substance.
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.)
I just ran through the first 100 Front page times and there are barely any business related news.
I also dont see how the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology. Other than some rare news on another Unicorn, Public Listing, earning from FAANG. There has rarely been any business news on HN at all.
There are some economics news ( if you count them as business news ), but are again in the minorities.
YC backed start up Jobs are only shown may be once per day. They are more like ads on HN. Who is hiring is also only a monthly posting.
I am actually in flavour of more business news, but I also think the current balance seems to be fine.
Anecdotally, I would claim that there is a lot more non-tech content during the week, and mostly tech content on the weekends (see for yourself via the "past" link at the top).
So may be if you only ever go on HN during weekdays, the amount of business entries could be a little higher, but generally speaking I still believe HN aren't anywhere business focus at all. ( If it was I wouldn't have to rant about Supply Chain and Operation management every time the topic comes up )
If you think we don't talk about hacking enough, then give us something to talk about
I'll come back and leave a comment on some of those. But by the time I do they may be a page or two deeper and not much makes the front page if they haven't already by that point. A later post on the same subject might make the front page though. I've seen that happen a lot here.
That said, there's still a lot here about "software, hardware, computer science". As far as "hacker culture" goes I'm not really sure what that is.
/show is currently capping out at only 41 entries, and /ask is 61. Looking at them both it seems the cut off is -48 hours. Extending this to 72 hours would be trivial and prevent older posts ageing off too quick - not everyone looks at those pages every day.
I'm hoping dang has this on his long list of to-do items!
I'd much rather read about a startup's postmortem than about some monads-as-a-service library releasing version 14.374.299
Felt like that with articles about Rust as well
I know it feels this way but it was in fact a very long time ago. That was 2011-2012ish IIRC
2009-2012 was the time of post-jQuery, with a lot of discourse around better alternatives to that (e.g. underscore.js, backbone.js).
React was released in 2013, which sparked a lot of offshoots. Vue came in 2014, and Angular in 2016, which I would say is the earliest point where you could see a significant drop in the activity.