13 ms·

I liked this article, though I think it missed the best part of Hacker News. To me, Hacker News can feel like walking through Dumbledore's office -- magical and

I liked this article, though I think it missed the best part of Hacker News. To me, Hacker News can feel like walking through Dumbledore's office -- magical and mind-bending collections of incredible devices, ideas, and oddities. Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a self-taught technologist, HN has exposed me to SICP, functional programming, and just yesterday someone posted a book about Data Structures and Algorithms that I started reading. Dang was quoted as describing HN as a "hall of mirrors" or "fractal tree." The author's focus on the controversial political parts of HN seems to me like going to a music festival and commenting on the food trucks. Yes, it's part of the experience, but that's not why people go and not what makes it magical. Communicating the beauty of unfamiliar technical topics to a lay reader is much harder than politics, but the New Yorker has done well at that elsewhere (I like the Sanjay and Jeff profile). Moderation is an interesting topic in its own right, though, especially in the age of the IRA and meme-warfare.

mfoy_ 7y ago
Don't suppose you saved a link to that comment?
- viraptor 7y ago
  Search works pretty well for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20629871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20629871
  - mfoy_ 7y ago
    Ah, darn, I was hoping for a whole bevy of cool links. Thanks! :)
ckris 7y ago
In defense of the article, what you are talking about is a different story more "finding the Internet and programming" that isn't really unique to Hacker News. It can surely be used that way, and people likely do, but you can also find those things by searching for "top programming books" (or hanging around twitter, quora, medium or other sites). They did sort of talk about that with the early motivations for Hacker News. And you could absolutely go to a music festival and write about the food trucks, the people and the atmosphere that if that is what unique about that festival. I think they did a good job in that regard. People don't obsessively read Hacker News to help newcomers, they do so because it is all in all a technical tabloid.
- mushufasa 7y ago
  I don't see HN as an intro course to programming, but more of like that older kid on the block who you notice is listening to bob dylan, and then you try again, you start to get past that nasally voice, really listening to the lyrics this time, and now you're turned on to a whole world of good music.
  - 18pfsmt 7y ago
    [I, honestly, am hostile to n00b accounts discussing non-tech topics.] I agreed with you from your opening thread until you held high Dylan's lyrics, rather than his instrumentally produced melodies which entranced me in the 80s. Poetry is not legalese or code, and is open to interpretaion.
    - 18pfsmt 7y ago
      Downvotes, but no arguments, because they have none. It is quite sick.
    - dang 7y ago
      There's no requirement to explain downvotes on HN, because for every comment that added signal that way, there would be a thousand that added noise. That means each of us has to sort of figure out what led their comment to get downvoted. It's slower perhaps, but doable. In the case of your parent comment, the bit about hostility to noob accounts wasn't very kind, and the rest of the comment was sort of shallow and dismissive. Those things lead correctly to downvotes because they're against the site guidelines. Ditto for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650649. Probably your best bet would be to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart when commenting here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649242 and marked it off-topic.
      - 18pfsmt 7y ago
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
I like this article as well. But I think while it legitimately criticizes parts of the Hacker News and Silicon Valley culture of missing humanism and ethics (it quoted "they’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, [...] Society [...] is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. [...] Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see."), it also ignored the fact that Hacker News is not only a Silicon Valley backyard (although often is, but the matter of fact is:), it does attack unethical practices in technology as well, sometimes contrarian. For example, just now, I saw a submission called "Western Academia Helps Build China’s Automated Racism", one comment says, * There are almost no ethical uses for facial recognition. It is a technology for criminals. * Is that racist? This algorithm seems to be specifically built to detect non-ethnic Chinese faces to further discrimination. Also, yesterday's submission of "Can ads on a page read my password?", the top comment harshly criticized targeted ads: * I really wish awareness of this reached a wider audience, third party advertising is a terrible blight on the web that has been allowed to grow and fester - it supplies no value and compromises both browser security and our peace of mind - being bombarded by these things constantly is training most of us to ignore a lot more and focus on short focused bursts of information... If the article can add just a single example, it could make the story be more balanced, without affecting the overall theme and tone of the article.
mysterydip 7y ago
Agreed on the fractal tree. My favorite part is clicking on the comments of an article whose subject I have some experience in, and finding new areas of it I didn't know about before. I can't count how many rabbit holes I've fallen down following links to downloads, videos, and code repositories.
noobermin 7y ago
This comment is a very measured critique of the article but one need not be so kind. I imagine you may not be doing it our of mere politeness, I get the sense some comments are bending over backwards as a means to not play into the perspective in this article. I won't be so kind: the author imputed every bias they have about a community they know nothing about and played on stereotypes from the beginning and didn't even shy away from saying it: > Picturing the moderators responsible for steering conversation on Hacker News, I imagined a team of men who proudly self-identify as neoliberals and are active in the effective-altruism movement. (I assumed they’d be white men; it never occurred to me that women, or people of color, could be behind the site.) Meeting them, I feared, would be like participating in a live-action comment thread about the merits of Amazon Web Services or whether women should be referred to as “females.” “Debate us!” I imagined them saying, in unison, from their Aeron chairs. Imagine wanting to write a piece about any group or any community and having such coarse ideas of who they are and what they believe before you interview them. Do journalists not care about things like biases, cognitive or otherwise and how they can color your opinion of the subject you write about? The sheer lack of self-awareness is part and parcel of the larger problem both people on the right and the left have with the news media in general. I'm a leftist personally, I tire of the neoliberal bent towards this place too but I have some sense of context and at least try to be aware of how my own worldview can affect the way I understand others. It's always disheartening to read articles, even if they are opinion from authors that really don't even try, even a little--especially when organs like the media, just like tech companies, have a large amount of power and ability to shape public opinion. You have to be looking for toxic and overly reactionary opinions to find them; they do flare up but are generally downvoted/flagged, and given this experience I have, this article really serves as a great example of the Gell-Mann effect as others have pointed out. Altogether, there are some interesting bits, I had no idea of the personal life stories around dang and sctb, but it was rather painful to wade through the constant recitals of tech bro stereotypes.
- ckris 7y ago
  It is a pretty common way to setup these stories, to play into stereotypes to disarm the reader (basically acknowledging their fears) and open them up to something else. It just isn't written for this audience or from its perspective.
Waterluvian 7y ago
HN is filled with Silicon valley nonsense, tropes, and hot garbage. But the things you describe are why I keep coming back. There's always something new to learn.
- sutro 7y ago
  If I ever start another blog, would you mind if I titled it Nonsense, Tropes, and Hot Garbage?
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I encourage it.
incompatible 7y ago
Yes, it's an interesting article, but I was also disapointed that I'd never been emailed by Gackle and Bell. Then I remembered that I hadn't set an email address on my profile.
mushufasa 7y ago
Since this comment gained traction, here are some better examples of what I meant by dumbledore's office: A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308 (This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446 Stumbling down the root domain of the above link leads you to the collected archive of _why_the_lucky_stiff, a hacker artist who created technical documentation as if it were a work of literature, animating and writing songs about ruby in a unique aesop meets kaftka meets neutral milk hotel style, and who then suddenly disappeared and deleted his whole internet persona, transmitting a 96-page oblique missive years later as individual PCL files. https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ Someone documents how using the 30+ year old, tiny awk language let him do what all the latest fad big data tools couldn't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579 Several posts this past week from natashenka's Project Zero blog led me to her passion project of being the world's leading expert in hacking tamagutchis, which read as part instructional and part love letter to digital pets http://natashenka.ca/ http://natashenka.ca/ Even though I'm ostensibly in the same industry as retail brokerages, I've never understood their business models as well as I did when I read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551 Not to keep going, but just to have a less lame example than a couple introductory textbooks -- I didn't mean to imply HN as a surrogate class syllabus
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Unbeliever69 7y ago
  I think that the Dumbledore's Office analogy is perfect for my use of HN. Frankly, it is the ONLY reason I use HN as I find the discourse (mostly) elitist and exclusive (tiringly).
slackfan 7y ago
Read Another Book.
ckris 7y ago
Honestly it is a bit weird how you seemingly jumped the thread to address my other comment. My point is still the same whether it is about programming or programming culture. This material is mostly produced elsewhere and present in all programming outlets. What makes HN different is to a large extent what they focus on in the article, including the mix of programming and mainstream news. Most other outlets don't allow this, especially not as liberally. It is easy to equate HN with programming culture, but I just don't think it is really how things are. Hacker News also has a specific different culture. Of course one might argue that allowing more popular content makes programming culture more accessible, and exposes more people to it. I just object to the slight dismissal of the article, because that is the topic at hand. But now below the fold.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  It is technology + business, which is not well represented in other places. Reddit/programming for instance is full of communists that just don't get it that somebody might be in it for the money (in part or in whole.) LinkedIn is full of self-promoters self-promoting the idea of self-promotion and doesn't have much space for people who really care about tech.
edpichler 7y ago
> he author's focus on the controversial political parts of HN seems to me like going to a music festival and commenting on the food trucks. Excellent, lol. A very good way to describe it.

mfoy_ 7y ago

Don't suppose you saved a link to that comment?

viraptor 7y ago
Search works pretty well for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20629871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20629871
- mfoy_ 7y ago
  Ah, darn, I was hoping for a whole bevy of cool links. Thanks! :)

ckris 7y ago

In defense of the article, what you are talking about is a different story more "finding the Internet and programming" that isn't really unique to Hacker News. It can surely be used that way, and people likely do, but you can also find those things by searching for "top programming books" (or hanging around twitter, quora, medium or other sites). They did sort of talk about that with the early motivations for Hacker News. And you could absolutely go to a music festival and write about the food trucks, the people and the atmosphere that if that is what unique about that festival. I think they did a good job in that regard. People don't obsessively read Hacker News to help newcomers, they do so because it is all in all a technical tabloid.

mushufasa 7y ago
I don't see HN as an intro course to programming, but more of like that older kid on the block who you notice is listening to bob dylan, and then you try again, you start to get past that nasally voice, really listening to the lyrics this time, and now you're turned on to a whole world of good music.
- 18pfsmt 7y ago
  [I, honestly, am hostile to n00b accounts discussing non-tech topics.] I agreed with you from your opening thread until you held high Dylan's lyrics, rather than his instrumentally produced melodies which entranced me in the 80s. Poetry is not legalese or code, and is open to interpretaion.
  - 18pfsmt 7y ago
    Downvotes, but no arguments, because they have none. It is quite sick.
  - dang 7y ago
    There's no requirement to explain downvotes on HN, because for every comment that added signal that way, there would be a thousand that added noise. That means each of us has to sort of figure out what led their comment to get downvoted. It's slower perhaps, but doable. In the case of your parent comment, the bit about hostility to noob accounts wasn't very kind, and the rest of the comment was sort of shallow and dismissive. Those things lead correctly to downvotes because they're against the site guidelines. Ditto for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650649. Probably your best bet would be to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart when commenting here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649242 and marked it off-topic.
    - 18pfsmt 7y ago

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

I like this article as well. But I think while it legitimately criticizes parts of the Hacker News and Silicon Valley culture of missing humanism and ethics (it quoted "they’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, [...] Society [...] is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. [...] Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see."), it also ignored the fact that Hacker News is not only a Silicon Valley backyard (although often is, but the matter of fact is:), it does attack unethical practices in technology as well, sometimes contrarian. For example, just now, I saw a submission called "Western Academia Helps Build China’s Automated Racism", one comment says, * There are almost no ethical uses for facial recognition. It is a technology for criminals. * Is that racist? This algorithm seems to be specifically built to detect non-ethnic Chinese faces to further discrimination. Also, yesterday's submission of "Can ads on a page read my password?", the top comment harshly criticized targeted ads: * I really wish awareness of this reached a wider audience, third party advertising is a terrible blight on the web that has been allowed to grow and fester - it supplies no value and compromises both browser security and our peace of mind - being bombarded by these things constantly is training most of us to ignore a lot more and focus on short focused bursts of information... If the article can add just a single example, it could make the story be more balanced, without affecting the overall theme and tone of the article.

mysterydip 7y ago

Agreed on the fractal tree. My favorite part is clicking on the comments of an article whose subject I have some experience in, and finding new areas of it I didn't know about before. I can't count how many rabbit holes I've fallen down following links to downloads, videos, and code repositories.

noobermin 7y ago

This comment is a very measured critique of the article but one need not be so kind. I imagine you may not be doing it our of mere politeness, I get the sense some comments are bending over backwards as a means to not play into the perspective in this article. I won't be so kind: the author imputed every bias they have about a community they know nothing about and played on stereotypes from the beginning and didn't even shy away from saying it: > Picturing the moderators responsible for steering conversation on Hacker News, I imagined a team of men who proudly self-identify as neoliberals and are active in the effective-altruism movement. (I assumed they’d be white men; it never occurred to me that women, or people of color, could be behind the site.) Meeting them, I feared, would be like participating in a live-action comment thread about the merits of Amazon Web Services or whether women should be referred to as “females.” “Debate us!” I imagined them saying, in unison, from their Aeron chairs. Imagine wanting to write a piece about any group or any community and having such coarse ideas of who they are and what they believe before you interview them. Do journalists not care about things like biases, cognitive or otherwise and how they can color your opinion of the subject you write about? The sheer lack of self-awareness is part and parcel of the larger problem both people on the right and the left have with the news media in general. I'm a leftist personally, I tire of the neoliberal bent towards this place too but I have some sense of context and at least try to be aware of how my own worldview can affect the way I understand others. It's always disheartening to read articles, even if they are opinion from authors that really don't even try, even a little--especially when organs like the media, just like tech companies, have a large amount of power and ability to shape public opinion. You have to be looking for toxic and overly reactionary opinions to find them; they do flare up but are generally downvoted/flagged, and given this experience I have, this article really serves as a great example of the Gell-Mann effect as others have pointed out. Altogether, there are some interesting bits, I had no idea of the personal life stories around dang and sctb, but it was rather painful to wade through the constant recitals of tech bro stereotypes.

ckris 7y ago
It is a pretty common way to setup these stories, to play into stereotypes to disarm the reader (basically acknowledging their fears) and open them up to something else. It just isn't written for this audience or from its perspective.

Waterluvian 7y ago

HN is filled with Silicon valley nonsense, tropes, and hot garbage. But the things you describe are why I keep coming back. There's always something new to learn.

sutro 7y ago
If I ever start another blog, would you mind if I titled it Nonsense, Tropes, and Hot Garbage?
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I encourage it.

incompatible 7y ago

Yes, it's an interesting article, but I was also disapointed that I'd never been emailed by Gackle and Bell. Then I remembered that I hadn't set an email address on my profile.

mushufasa 7y ago

Since this comment gained traction, here are some better examples of what I meant by dumbledore's office: A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308 (This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446 Stumbling down the root domain of the above link leads you to the collected archive of _why_the_lucky_stiff, a hacker artist who created technical documentation as if it were a work of literature, animating and writing songs about ruby in a unique aesop meets kaftka meets neutral milk hotel style, and who then suddenly disappeared and deleted his whole internet persona, transmitting a 96-page oblique missive years later as individual PCL files. https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ Someone documents how using the 30+ year old, tiny awk language let him do what all the latest fad big data tools couldn't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579 Several posts this past week from natashenka's Project Zero blog led me to her passion project of being the world's leading expert in hacking tamagutchis, which read as part instructional and part love letter to digital pets http://natashenka.ca/ http://natashenka.ca/ Even though I'm ostensibly in the same industry as retail brokerages, I've never understood their business models as well as I did when I read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551 Not to keep going, but just to have a less lame example than a couple introductory textbooks -- I didn't mean to imply HN as a surrogate class syllabus

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Unbeliever69 7y ago
I think that the Dumbledore's Office analogy is perfect for my use of HN. Frankly, it is the ONLY reason I use HN as I find the discourse (mostly) elitist and exclusive (tiringly).

slackfan 7y ago

Read Another Book.

ckris 7y ago

Honestly it is a bit weird how you seemingly jumped the thread to address my other comment. My point is still the same whether it is about programming or programming culture. This material is mostly produced elsewhere and present in all programming outlets. What makes HN different is to a large extent what they focus on in the article, including the mix of programming and mainstream news. Most other outlets don't allow this, especially not as liberally. It is easy to equate HN with programming culture, but I just don't think it is really how things are. Hacker News also has a specific different culture. Of course one might argue that allowing more popular content makes programming culture more accessible, and exposes more people to it. I just object to the slight dismissal of the article, because that is the topic at hand. But now below the fold.

PaulHoule 7y ago
It is technology + business, which is not well represented in other places. Reddit/programming for instance is full of communists that just don't get it that somebody might be in it for the money (in part or in whole.) LinkedIn is full of self-promoters self-promoting the idea of self-promotion and doesn't have much space for people who really care about tech.

edpichler 7y ago

> he author's focus on the controversial political parts of HN seems to me like going to a music festival and commenting on the food trucks. Excellent, lol. A very good way to describe it.