5 ms·

Good points here. Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. PG and his cofounders invented the web app, using a combination of old tech

Good points here. Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. PG and his cofounders invented the web app, using a combination of old tech (lisp) and new (the internet). There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem. “How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter. Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.

scarface74 7y ago
Hacker News ranks at #959 in the US. It didn’t get that rank from just being geared toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general. HN’s front page 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10 HN’s front page 5 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10
- wildermuthn 7y ago
  We’re both making points based off anecdotal experience, so who knows. I have been a reader for the last 7 or 8 years, but my experience is just one subjective data-point. Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You don’t have to use anecdotal experience. You can use the same link format for any day that Hacker News existed and see the same thing.
    - wildermuthn 7y ago
      HN archives are stored in BigQuery, so it would be possible to do an analysis that was more rigorous than a human reading the thousands of front pages to see a pattern of difference.
yourbandsucks 7y ago
Oh, for christ's sake. I don't want to get all "get off my lawn" but HN is full of early-20-somethings rediscovering things and calling them 'bleeding edge'. The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.
- GordonS 7y ago
  A good example of this is static typing - shat on for years by HN, and now, all of a sudden it's the greatest thing since sliced bread!
  - staticTypes 7y ago
    And you know why, right? Fucking JavaScript. Strong static types have always been awesome, because there are no mysteries, no surprises. A chair is a chair. A wheel is a wheel. Fire is hot and water is wet. But, hey, fucking JavaScript, so look at my bullshit variable! Is it a function? Sure! Does it have properties! You bet! Is it a chair? Who the fuck knows! The 'legs' array is undefined... Can we make it a chair? Of course! I need a wheel, can we make it a wheel too? You betcha! Just assign more fucking properties! Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! Hey, can I post this retarded data bag right the fuck back over to two different API endpoints? Why the fuck not? Okay, assholes, check out my greasy, cheese filled, swiss army bullshit unicycle or whatever the fuck this is, I don't even fucking care anymore, because I can't wait to just become an amnesiac, dump my client side session cache and pretend this whole fucking nightmare never even happened.
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today. The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive... Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
slavapestov 7y ago
> Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. Or engineers who've convinced themselves that they're Tier 1 engineers...
goto11 7y ago
You are assuming "tier 1 engineers" are also the ones using the bleeding edge technologies. This is not true in my experience. The best developers care a lot about using the best tools available for a particular task - which is very different from using the newest tools avaialbe. In reality it typically takes a long time for a tool to become mature enough for productive use, at which point it is not cutting edge anymore.
- pojzon 7y ago
  In case of open source, everyone wants someone to (beta) test their solutions in production. Only after few years of that such testing a tech product becomes usable for the rest of the industry and thats when it becomes profitable. Im not surprised the leaders of IT, ppl who create those new technologies, push for a narrative to use those new shiny things.

scarface74 7y ago

Hacker News ranks at #959 in the US. It didn’t get that rank from just being geared toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general. HN’s front page 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10 HN’s front page 5 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10

wildermuthn 7y ago
We’re both making points based off anecdotal experience, so who knows. I have been a reader for the last 7 or 8 years, but my experience is just one subjective data-point. Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You don’t have to use anecdotal experience. You can use the same link format for any day that Hacker News existed and see the same thing.
  - wildermuthn 7y ago
    HN archives are stored in BigQuery, so it would be possible to do an analysis that was more rigorous than a human reading the thousands of front pages to see a pattern of difference.

yourbandsucks 7y ago

Oh, for christ's sake. I don't want to get all "get off my lawn" but HN is full of early-20-somethings rediscovering things and calling them 'bleeding edge'. The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.

GordonS 7y ago
A good example of this is static typing - shat on for years by HN, and now, all of a sudden it's the greatest thing since sliced bread!
- staticTypes 7y ago
  And you know why, right? Fucking JavaScript. Strong static types have always been awesome, because there are no mysteries, no surprises. A chair is a chair. A wheel is a wheel. Fire is hot and water is wet. But, hey, fucking JavaScript, so look at my bullshit variable! Is it a function? Sure! Does it have properties! You bet! Is it a chair? Who the fuck knows! The 'legs' array is undefined... Can we make it a chair? Of course! I need a wheel, can we make it a wheel too? You betcha! Just assign more fucking properties! Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! Hey, can I post this retarded data bag right the fuck back over to two different API endpoints? Why the fuck not? Okay, assholes, check out my greasy, cheese filled, swiss army bullshit unicycle or whatever the fuck this is, I don't even fucking care anymore, because I can't wait to just become an amnesiac, dump my client side session cache and pretend this whole fucking nightmare never even happened.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today. The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive... Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

slavapestov 7y ago

> Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. Or engineers who've convinced themselves that they're Tier 1 engineers...

goto11 7y ago

You are assuming "tier 1 engineers" are also the ones using the bleeding edge technologies. This is not true in my experience. The best developers care a lot about using the best tools available for a particular task - which is very different from using the newest tools avaialbe. In reality it typically takes a long time for a tool to become mature enough for productive use, at which point it is not cutting edge anymore.

pojzon 7y ago
In case of open source, everyone wants someone to (beta) test their solutions in production. Only after few years of that such testing a tech product becomes usable for the rest of the industry and thats when it becomes profitable. Im not surprised the leaders of IT, ppl who create those new technologies, push for a narrative to use those new shiny things.