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Why is this bitter, trite diatribe on the front page of hacker news?
by rsingel 15y ago
Why is this bitter, trite diatribe on the front page of hacker news?
- chailatte 15y agoHits too close to home, staff writer for Wired?
- rsingel 15y agoActually, not in the slightest, which you'd know if you'd bothered to go any further than just my hacker news bio - say checking my Twitter feed - before dashing off an ad hominem attack. No, I thought the post was boring, poorly written and just bitter. And that makes it unworthy, in my opinion, of the front page of Hacker News. This kind of sophomoric crap belongs somewhere on Reddit, not Hacker News.
- pushingbits 15y ago>> say checking my Twitter feed Haha. That would have been very well played if it had been intentional, but I somehow doubt that that's the case.
- rsingel 15y agoNo, my point is simpler than that. The linked post is a lame rehash of the "Twitter is for self-centered people talking about mundane crap" criticism, with the twist that it's targeted at hipsters. The commenter suggested that hit too close to home. Here's a quick test. Look at the homepage of the guy who wrote the OP and look at his Twitter feed -- it looks pretty much like something you'd expect from someone like the hipster made fun of in the post. I'm a tech writer. I use Twitter as part of my work, and rarely post personal stuff. And more to the point, I really don't care how other people use Twitter, nor do I find my self-worth in making fun of how they do use Twitter or FourSquare -- even when what I do or don't do on those services differs from them.
- athst 15y agoI agree, I have never quite understood this meme of mocking hipster stereotypes. It's mean-spirited and in most cases very hypocritical.
- diolpah 15y agoI will make an attempt at enlightening you. There are a great number of greying or almost-greying engineers and other tech types who are part of a generation preceding the current "cool" generation. This older generation of hackers and engineers got into the industry because the allure of building systems that made society a better place and benefited humanity broadly was a very powerful driver. For years and decades, this passion drove them to build the foundations of what we now know to be modern energy production, electronics, computing, and networking. Dreams of taking civilization to the stars, of creating limitless energy sources, of using technology to empower oppressed people and bring others out of poverty drove many of this generation forward. The reality? Masses upon masses of highly indebted hipsters sipping lattes, tweeting about a band they heard called "Shitdripper", on a device thousands of times more powerful than anything available to the NSA a generation ago, bitching about how they can't get a seven figure salary flipping credit default swaps anymore, in a city that, although it once stood for real technological innovation, works hard to churn out hundreds of also-ran photo sharing apps so that said hipsters can post a thousand photos of their purse dog wearing a kermit the frog costume. Because there was a generation that dreamed of greatness, and the technology they delivered is being used to enable mediocrity. At least that's my guess.
- qq66 15y agoI don't think the companies today are any less impactful than the companies of yesteryear. What's different is that now, because of consumer Internet, "cool people" are getting into computer programming. The old guard of Silicon Valley was very awkward and nerdy -- Bill Gates is the archetype. Today's software entrepreneurs are more like Jack Dorsey -- they dress well, have no trouble getting dates, and people on the street know their companies. The nerds look at these people and say "This is OUR thing. Get out of here." And resent these new unwanted arrivals.
- 15y ago