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Urban Dictionary on Hacker News (2013)
- topicseed 5y ago> 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?
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoWell, Im a shameless imposter masquerading as an employed software engineer. Thats one. Or two maybe assuming you are?
- meristohm 5y agoMy primary work title is Dad/Homemaker, and I have an interest in software development for improving learning, for one.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoHN 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.
- Causality1 5y agoA 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.
- kortilla 5y agoIt has nothing to do with free time. It’s just a numbers game. There are a lot more employees than there are entrepreneurs.
- EamonnMR 5y agoThe original core audience was Paul Graham fans as far as I know. I think I found HN because it was the thing Arc was used for.
- praptak 5y agoCount me in that group. I am a refugee from Slashdot, after I had found out I hated their new threading UI.
- wayeq 5y agoI always thought the bulk of HN was tech folks that got too old and grumpy for reddit.
- cblconfederate 5y agojudging from the upvoted topics there are probably more marketing/hr/managerial people now than engineers/scientists
- onion2k 5y agoI'm pretty sure there are at least four or five HN users who have a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. We're not all unsuccessful.
- smoldesu 5y agoSeems about right to me.
- beeboop 5y agoI think we all make the mistake sometimes of attaching too much weight to the opinions we read online. For some reason I attach more weight to HN opinions but after meeting a few frequent HN posters in real life and seeing recent discussions about vaccines, I no longer do this. I realize this is a really shitty post and I wish I had the time to rework it to sound less prissy.
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoInteresting (also funny), I never thought of HN from that angle. Does this feel true to HN users or is it more a joke? While I was transitioning to a software job I found myself checking HN a lot because it seemed like a raw discussion forum for what software engineers were thinking / talking about. Seemed better than Reddit. Still haven't found a better alternative.
- Nevermark 5y agoI think for some of us remote workers ... [... Ha, my entire career! So we call it "remote" now? And its considered a progressive perk? Awesome! For decades I just thought I was "working in bed" and it wasn't something to talk about ...] ... really do need a facsimile for interesting and stimulating water cooler conversation. Until I find that place, Hacker News will do!
- yoz-y 5y agoAt least the part about wasting time does. Luckily there is the noprocrast option.
- t-writescode 5y agoI’m sure we’ve all seen posts here from people that make us think very unkindly of the HN culture.
- psyc 5y agoSuch a missed opportunity. There are so many funnier tropes about HN to mock. Personally, I think of HN as a place for software developers to pontificate and nerd-snipe about constitutional law, public health, economics, and more.
- smoe 5y agoFrom my perspective HN is big enough that you can shape your own experience by what links you are clicking. E.g. I feel I haven't seen that much of the "entrepreneur" aspect, because I don't frequent the typical startup topics much. Instead I'm interested in the more timeless "philosophical" discussions about software engineering in general where I always feel I get something out of it or encounter further readings. Nothing live changing so far, but interesting nonetheless.
- blululu 5y agoThis 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.
- cortesoft 5y agoWhen did FAANG become FAAMG?
- kartoshechka 5y agoit's the comment from the recent post "who else would put M in FAANG besides a Microsoft employee?"
- jstx1 5y agoIt makes some sense - if you replace Netflix with MS, the list will be the 5 largest tech companies. Netflix is only there because of how the term was coined in the first place - FANG (originally without Apple) was a list of stocks that Jim Cramer liked around 2013 and the acronym caught on and evolved from there.
- rdiddly 5y agoI always wondered why the hell Netflix was even on the list, so thanks.
- HPsquared 5y agoIt's like the BRICs countries - Brazil doesn't really fit.
- FillardMillmore 5y agoCurious, is Jim Cramer generally respected by the crowd that frequents HN?
- Nevermark 5y agoIt is good humor. An Onion article would be even greater praise. On a more serious note, I for one plan on continuing to lurk and comment here until I achieve the unprecedented entrepreneurial financial success that I know my lurking and commenting here more than qualify me for!
- weare138 5y agohttps://www.theolognion.com/ai-solves-all-political-economic-and-medical-problems-after-parsing-hacker-news-comments/ https://www.theolognion.com/ai-solves-all-political-economic...
- elipsey 5y agoWe're not _all_ unsuccessful entrepreneurs, I for one am an unemployed programmer!
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThe first thing I thought was Mark Cuban was the wrong guy to use as an example. (Always felt Cuban got lucky during the early days of the gold rush. I feel that way about most financially successful people though?) I think that definition missed a few HN personality types. It forgot unsuccessful, lonely, egotistical, disenfranchised, shut-in's---like myself.
- preommr 5y agoThe first thing I thought was Mark Cuban was the perfect guy to use as an example. It made me trigger even more for the exact reason you mentioned.
- halgir 5y agoReminds me of when 4chan pretended to be Hacker News. Thread archive: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148 https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148 HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317
- 0x737368 5y ago4chan 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.
- brailsafe 5y agoIt's not too bad, but I'd only go up to comedy silver.
- weimerica 5y agoIt's often a better place to have real, open discussion than HN.
- User23 5y agoIt’s amusing that 4chan is the something awful forum’s fault. I was reminded of this by the phrase “comedy gold.”
- willis936 5y agomoot had a good sense of humor. Maybe he still does. No idea. When I read the history of 4chan[0] years ago, this story in particular stuck out to me (as being hilarious). >February 21 - Two discussion boards are added, hosted on 0ch: /amh/ (Anime-Manga-Hentai) and /bbs/ (4chan Discussion). The next day, Censored Vagina makes a newspost announcing that the cost of running 4chan for the rest of 2004 added up to $2,200 and that the money would be needed in donations. The links on 4chan are reflected to link to 4chan.org instead of 4chan.net so that users will not need to write 4chan.org's IP into their hosts file. >March 1 - moot announces that the site will not be able to continue because the March server bill is too large to pay and that more donations will be required to pay it or 4chan will die. He makes one final request for donations and hopes for the best. According to a news post image about the original /q/, /q/ - Questions was added this day. >March 8 - After a week-long swarm of donations, moot announces that not only does he have enough money to pay the March bill, but that enough money was donated to keep the site running into 2005. moot thanks all donators and posters and announces that he is currently in "Cancun, Mexico". 0. https://github.com/bibanon/4chan.doc/releases/tag/1.4.3 https://github.com/bibanon/4chan.doc/releases/tag/1.4.3
- sillysaurusx 5y ago> A place unknown to financially successful entrepreneurs. 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fossuser 5y agoThat’s sad, I wish they were still active here.
- jimhi 5y agoWe are. Most threads have at least one. I find the longer they have been out of yc the less they are here though
- dang 5y agoLast 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.
- eddieh 5y agoThat, perhaps, explains the sometimes unexpected anti-business/capitalist comments and sentiment here.
- novok 5y agoSo by bookface you mean a facebook group
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI really want to say "yes" and see where the conversation leads. No, I meant Bookface, YC's internal clone of Hacker News.
- jstx1 5y agoThere is also https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitHNSays/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitHNSays/. It's not that active but it has quite a few gems.
- midwestemo 5y agoProbably my favorite one on there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25791306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25791306
- kirykl 5y agoThere’s also a critical HN parody site http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ Copy paste url as it apparently intercepts the HN referer
- goodpoint 5y agon-gate is my favorite read. It restores my sanity.
- mypastself 5y ago2021 version would have to include: 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.
- enlyth 5y agoJavascript bad, peak UI was Windows 95, mention screen readers in every post about interfaces
- asien 5y agoOr 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. That damn Oracle Conspiracy, and OOP !
- olingern 5y agoDon’t forget the ever important monthly note taking thread / post where every top comment starts with Roam/Obsidian, followed by org mode, and always ends with a single note text file.
- the_only_law 5y ago> Anything that’s not OOP False. We could have had Smalltalk.
- krapp 5y agoHacker 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. Your stupid project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 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.
- adventured 5y ago> Hey Mr. Cuban, did you see that post on Hacker News? It's amusing that's the supporting point line, because whoever wrote the entry is placing their self in the category they're trying to peg HN with. I was in business with Mark across a bunch of years, he has always had an interest in news, news aggregation sites, information acquisition and delivery in general. He was familiar with Hacker News, including understanding its association with Y Combinator, and he always liked it when BlogMaverick posts hit the front page. He understood its relevance in the tech ecosystem. For years after Mark set up his venture capital business, he (his team) used Y Combinator's various public docs as the foundation for the investment agreements.
- blastonico 5y agoPerfectly described, now I'll search for WallStreetBets, that I visit very frequently.
- thrower123 5y agoSeems relatively accurate
- conradfr 5y agoI would have been more interested in the Encyclopedia Dramatica page about HN ;)
- willis936 5y agoI'm surprised there is no Encyclopedia Dramatica entry on Hacker News.
- api 5y agoHN is a lot of /r/iamverysmart except some people actually know something.
- beeboop 5y agoThe problem is that it's often impossible to know if the person commenting has any idea what they're talking about
- based2 5y agoeverything2 used to be more like that.
- asien 5y agoI find funny because it’s accurate ! 99% of entrepreneur fail , that’s literally why it’s hard and why it’s highly respected ! Remember when Tesla almost went Bankrupt ? It’s very like because it happens almost three times... and only now after 25+ years Tesla is making a profit by selling its cars without sorcery finances... Being an entrepreneur is hard , I love the Tesla example because even if Elon Musk had the vision and a superior engineering delivery , the company was technically a commercial failure for more than a decade. Being a better than average engineer ( probably a LOT of HN uses ) is unfortunately not enough to become a sucessfull entrepreneur !
- bob229 5y agoTesla was founded 18 years ago…
- Rd6n6 5y agoI like hacker news for tech news and career subjects, but indie hackers is where the founders seem to hang out. If I need to talk to somebody about bootstrapping, ih is great. A lot fewer technical people though, lots of site builders and no code setups. Hn users can write a bst in their sleep but ih users can make a landing and validate an idea while building a mailing list in their sleep
- leephillips 5y agoFair 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.
- FabHK 5y agoIn DuckDuckGo, you could use the !hn bang (which takes you to hn's Algolia search page).
- leephillips 5y agoThanks for pointing that out. Can also use the search box at the bottom of HN pages.
- self_buddliea 5y agoI'm aware of the philosophy behind HN and the dictionary entry alludes to this. From my experience it's more focussed on technology and a liking of knowledge in general. On the other hand, I still find this amusing.
- donaldihunter 5y agoThis thread! Talking about ourselves in an ironic / un-ironic / post-ironic way. There is room for more meta hacker news.
- black_13 5y agoAn accurate definition
- bob229 5y agoSounds accurate to me. I come here because the MSM is garbage but most of the commenters are narcissists with egos the size of planets
- neals 5y agocan confirm, am unsuccesful
- EMRZ 5y agoOne 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.
- systemvoltage 5y agoAlgorithms governing large amounts of information exchange in the world are all developed in California (Twitter/FB/Google) as well. 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-media-are-turbocharging-the-export-of-americas-political-culture https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me... Edit: Of course downvotes!
- seneca 5y ago> 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.
- javajosh 5y agoThis 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).
- dang 5y agoFewer 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.
- azangru 5y agoEntrepreneurs? Dang, I thought this was a forum for programmers.
- longtom 5y ago> hacker news Where opinion is being manipulated by the U.S. security/military complex.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoHaha this is funny. Don't take it so seriously folks ;-)
- doctor_eval 5y agoIsn’t urban dictionary maintained by ESR?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jason0597 5y agoIf you guys are looking for more humour, there's plenty more at https://reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk https://reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk