32 ms·

Why Paul? Why Did You Change It? (About Hacker News)

37 points by transburgh 19y ago

hhm 19y ago
I don't agree. I think this Hacker News idea is fantastic. Some time ago I proposed a "classic.reddit.com", the idea being the same: having a place where we could have the good old reddit, or rather, where we could have intelligent news back again.
pg 19y ago
Because we ourselves were bored with reading about nothing but startups. If our site was boring to us, it was probably boring to the audience we intended it for. This is hard for business guys to understand, but the people who make the best startup founders often don't care about business very much. Some of the most successful companies started next year will be started by people who do not currently plan to start companies.
- sherman 19y ago
  What if some people want to read only about start up news, but don't want to sift through items that are hacker news, and vice versa? Maybe we could have a "sort by category" feature?
  - menloparkbum 19y ago
    Couldn't people who only want to read about startup news just read TechCrunch?
    - transburgh 19y ago
      I prefer YC News to Techcrunch. YC Startup News does a better job of covering all startup news where Techcrunch is valley focused.
    - nickb 19y ago
      TC is awful and they're not an aggregator :( They're just posting PR stuff that companies send them. GigaOM is so much better... at least he looks at stuff more critically and says what he thinks.
    - joshwa 19y ago
      TC doesn't have the great hacker-in-the-trenches commenters that news.yc has. It was always so useful to see what my peers have to say about the nitty gritty stuff of startup building, share experiences/advice/etc...
    - rokhayakebe 19y ago
      At techcrunch you miss 90 % of startups. You only get to read about companies the editors believe are different. HERE, we are all the same. My karma could be 2 and still my story or startup could be on top of the listing.
    - moses1400 19y ago
      I would hope you like CenterNetworks as well and all of the other sites that provide the same as TC.
- jamongkad 19y ago
  Agreed but does this apply also to guys who just care about building a great product? and don't really much care about making money from it?
- davidw 19y ago
  Thus part of its appeal - by not having too much stuff, we didn't spend too much time here, and went back to working on more productive pursuits. I'll give it a week or two before any hand wringing. Let's see how it works out.
- dean 19y ago
  I don't like this idea. There are already many places on the net to find out about hacking. But this is the only place I've found for good stories about startups (of course, I stopped looking after I found this place). From what I can see, there is much more to a startup than hacking. And there are more kinds of people involved with startups than hackers. It is a disservice to the startup community to change the focus here. Besides, this site already has somewhat of a hacker focus anyway. Look at these items from the top-ten at this moment: #3 Coding Horror: Discipline Makes Strong Developers #5 Blueprint is a CSS framework #6 How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary #9 We are living in someone else's computer simulation Not exactly business ideas. And while you may be bored with reading this site, I don't see you as the typical audience here. I see this site as being for people who are in startups or thinking about doing a startup and who want to learn as much as they can. Not for people who've already been through it and already know all this stuff, like yourself. Even if Startup News began as your baby, I think you have to let it go. In short I think your initial premise is wrong. Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.
  - zcoelius 19y ago
    Second what Dean said. Lots of good hacker news places. Very few good early stage startup stuff. Too conflate what YC was with TC is silly. TC is a profile site. YC.news gathers helpful articles on how make your startup better. I'll miss YC news if it becomes just another programmer site.
    - Goladus 19y ago
      I think this will still be about making startups better, except in the sense that "better" doesn't always mean short-term present-day details.
  - BrandonM 19y ago
    Why does any of that matter? This is PG's free site, which he has invested his time in and has asked nothing back for. Who are you to call anything associated with this site a "disservice"? That is patently absurd. If you are not happy with this site anymore, you are free to go start your own. You should not be free, however, to sit idly by and condemn the decisions of those who are aiming to make progress.
- menloparkbum 19y ago
  I'll posit that the "startup" theme was what was responsible for all the self-help-SEO type posts. I'll gladly put up with arcane posts about how to configure your emacs environment to write haskell if it means I don't have to see anymore inane posts about improving my credit score by "track suit CEO."
- aswanson 19y ago
  As long as you can block out "xbox 360 halo level 3 mods/secret code" type posts I welcome the delta.
DougBTX 19y ago
What would be really interesting would be some sort of hidden A/B testing...
nickb 19y ago
I posted this in another thread: why not start a NEW website hackernews.org or something and leave this site alone? Why mess with success? This site is, after all, a subdomain of the YC site which is an early stage investment firm. n.yc.com made sense since it dealt with YC company news stories, VC investment, angel investment etc. stories. If you wanted to get funding from YC or wanted to learn how VC investment procedure works, this was a perfect complement to the main YC site. Now n.yc will become another reddit and will get flooded with all kinds of nonsense and will get a lot of "how do I haxor my ex's myspace account" since "hacker" really means cracker to like 99% of the internet population. Instead of spending 10 min to get an idea what the latest trends in investment community are, you'll have to spend 20+ minutes while. As for being bored and you're a startup founder, you're in trouble! And if you're really bored and need to read something, there's plenty of reddit & digg subdomains that are interesting. This new site will lose focus and will degrade into another digg or reddit. Second law of (thermodynamics) Internet almost guarantees it. Paul, if you want this site to become bigger and grow and become a better reddit and all that, why not get a new domain and start it there? Why destroy what works?
- simen 19y ago
  I guess the existing user mass is a big reason why changing focus instead of starting again is preferrable. Personally, I don't care about startup news, so I didn't bother to register until now; obviously I think it's a good idea. Perhaps my opinion doesn't count?
  - davidw 19y ago
    Presumably existing users are smart enough to track another site. It has some downsides too, such as overlapping content, but it might not have been a bad idea.
    - simen 19y ago
      It doesn't take much intelligence to follow two websites, but it does take some more effort. Also, it's perhaps that the site now caters more to the target audience than to the thing that unites them (Y combinator/startups).
zach 19y ago
That's ridiculous. It's just making clear what should have been clear from the start, which is that news.yc is news for Y Combinator people, not just about their startups. Hacker News is also much less bland. And for those hackers who don't think they're interested in startups, it's more tempting! (Muhahaha! Come, hackers, and catch the chronic startup syndrome!)
bmaier 19y ago
I don't know Paul but having followed here for a while and having read most of his work I'll offer you two reasons: 1) The site was losing its usefulness for him so he made it more useful for himself and chances are others will find it useful as well. 2) Because He Can Perhaps if you don't agree with the changes, then write your own news app and compete. Its how the world works after all.
webology 19y ago
Change is good but I think you mainly just stated what the site was becoming anyways based on the content as of lately. Hopefully, everyone can keep their politics in their basements and the hacker theme stays. That's why I stopped reading reddit daily. Now there's a politics sub-reddit but it took less then a week for it to junk up their homepage again...
gojomo 19y ago
Another long-term factor to consider: startup enthusiasm ebbs with business cycles, while hacking endures.
awt 19y ago
I like the change.
daniel-cussen 19y ago
I agree with the change. After a while, all the startup articles sound exactly the same. 10 tips for starting a startup...10 tips for dealing with VCs...what it takes to succeed...
Andys 19y ago
I think the new algorithm is going to make the site less adaptable to new concepts and ideas in the future, if a just few of the big users vote them down. The type of stories voted up high will get stuck at a local maxima in story space.
motivi 19y ago
Bad idea. What distinguished this site was the news on startups. If you want tech news there are hundreds of good sites out there. This becomes one more. Look at dzone, slashdot, and many more.

37 points by transburgh 19y ago

hhm 19y ago

I don't agree. I think this Hacker News idea is fantastic. Some time ago I proposed a "classic.reddit.com", the idea being the same: having a place where we could have the good old reddit, or rather, where we could have intelligent news back again.

pg 19y ago

Because we ourselves were bored with reading about nothing but startups. If our site was boring to us, it was probably boring to the audience we intended it for. This is hard for business guys to understand, but the people who make the best startup founders often don't care about business very much. Some of the most successful companies started next year will be started by people who do not currently plan to start companies.

sherman 19y ago
What if some people want to read only about start up news, but don't want to sift through items that are hacker news, and vice versa? Maybe we could have a "sort by category" feature?
- menloparkbum 19y ago
  Couldn't people who only want to read about startup news just read TechCrunch?
  - transburgh 19y ago
    I prefer YC News to Techcrunch. YC Startup News does a better job of covering all startup news where Techcrunch is valley focused.
  - nickb 19y ago
    TC is awful and they're not an aggregator :( They're just posting PR stuff that companies send them. GigaOM is so much better... at least he looks at stuff more critically and says what he thinks.
  - joshwa 19y ago
    TC doesn't have the great hacker-in-the-trenches commenters that news.yc has. It was always so useful to see what my peers have to say about the nitty gritty stuff of startup building, share experiences/advice/etc...
  - rokhayakebe 19y ago
    At techcrunch you miss 90 % of startups. You only get to read about companies the editors believe are different. HERE, we are all the same. My karma could be 2 and still my story or startup could be on top of the listing.
  - moses1400 19y ago
    I would hope you like CenterNetworks as well and all of the other sites that provide the same as TC.
jamongkad 19y ago
Agreed but does this apply also to guys who just care about building a great product? and don't really much care about making money from it?
davidw 19y ago
Thus part of its appeal - by not having too much stuff, we didn't spend too much time here, and went back to working on more productive pursuits. I'll give it a week or two before any hand wringing. Let's see how it works out.
dean 19y ago
I don't like this idea. There are already many places on the net to find out about hacking. But this is the only place I've found for good stories about startups (of course, I stopped looking after I found this place). From what I can see, there is much more to a startup than hacking. And there are more kinds of people involved with startups than hackers. It is a disservice to the startup community to change the focus here. Besides, this site already has somewhat of a hacker focus anyway. Look at these items from the top-ten at this moment: #3 Coding Horror: Discipline Makes Strong Developers #5 Blueprint is a CSS framework #6 How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary #9 We are living in someone else's computer simulation Not exactly business ideas. And while you may be bored with reading this site, I don't see you as the typical audience here. I see this site as being for people who are in startups or thinking about doing a startup and who want to learn as much as they can. Not for people who've already been through it and already know all this stuff, like yourself. Even if Startup News began as your baby, I think you have to let it go. In short I think your initial premise is wrong. Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.
- zcoelius 19y ago
  Second what Dean said. Lots of good hacker news places. Very few good early stage startup stuff. Too conflate what YC was with TC is silly. TC is a profile site. YC.news gathers helpful articles on how make your startup better. I'll miss YC news if it becomes just another programmer site.
  - Goladus 19y ago
    I think this will still be about making startups better, except in the sense that "better" doesn't always mean short-term present-day details.
- BrandonM 19y ago
  Why does any of that matter? This is PG's free site, which he has invested his time in and has asked nothing back for. Who are you to call anything associated with this site a "disservice"? That is patently absurd. If you are not happy with this site anymore, you are free to go start your own. You should not be free, however, to sit idly by and condemn the decisions of those who are aiming to make progress.
menloparkbum 19y ago
I'll posit that the "startup" theme was what was responsible for all the self-help-SEO type posts. I'll gladly put up with arcane posts about how to configure your emacs environment to write haskell if it means I don't have to see anymore inane posts about improving my credit score by "track suit CEO."
aswanson 19y ago
As long as you can block out "xbox 360 halo level 3 mods/secret code" type posts I welcome the delta.

DougBTX 19y ago

What would be really interesting would be some sort of hidden A/B testing...

nickb 19y ago

I posted this in another thread: why not start a NEW website hackernews.org or something and leave this site alone? Why mess with success? This site is, after all, a subdomain of the YC site which is an early stage investment firm. n.yc.com made sense since it dealt with YC company news stories, VC investment, angel investment etc. stories. If you wanted to get funding from YC or wanted to learn how VC investment procedure works, this was a perfect complement to the main YC site. Now n.yc will become another reddit and will get flooded with all kinds of nonsense and will get a lot of "how do I haxor my ex's myspace account" since "hacker" really means cracker to like 99% of the internet population. Instead of spending 10 min to get an idea what the latest trends in investment community are, you'll have to spend 20+ minutes while. As for being bored and you're a startup founder, you're in trouble! And if you're really bored and need to read something, there's plenty of reddit & digg subdomains that are interesting. This new site will lose focus and will degrade into another digg or reddit. Second law of (thermodynamics) Internet almost guarantees it. Paul, if you want this site to become bigger and grow and become a better reddit and all that, why not get a new domain and start it there? Why destroy what works?

simen 19y ago
I guess the existing user mass is a big reason why changing focus instead of starting again is preferrable. Personally, I don't care about startup news, so I didn't bother to register until now; obviously I think it's a good idea. Perhaps my opinion doesn't count?
- davidw 19y ago
  Presumably existing users are smart enough to track another site. It has some downsides too, such as overlapping content, but it might not have been a bad idea.
  - simen 19y ago
    It doesn't take much intelligence to follow two websites, but it does take some more effort. Also, it's perhaps that the site now caters more to the target audience than to the thing that unites them (Y combinator/startups).

zach 19y ago

That's ridiculous. It's just making clear what should have been clear from the start, which is that news.yc is news for Y Combinator people, not just about their startups. Hacker News is also much less bland. And for those hackers who don't think they're interested in startups, it's more tempting! (Muhahaha! Come, hackers, and catch the chronic startup syndrome!)

bmaier 19y ago

I don't know Paul but having followed here for a while and having read most of his work I'll offer you two reasons: 1) The site was losing its usefulness for him so he made it more useful for himself and chances are others will find it useful as well. 2) Because He Can Perhaps if you don't agree with the changes, then write your own news app and compete. Its how the world works after all.

webology 19y ago

Change is good but I think you mainly just stated what the site was becoming anyways based on the content as of lately. Hopefully, everyone can keep their politics in their basements and the hacker theme stays. That's why I stopped reading reddit daily. Now there's a politics sub-reddit but it took less then a week for it to junk up their homepage again...

gojomo 19y ago

Another long-term factor to consider: startup enthusiasm ebbs with business cycles, while hacking endures.

awt 19y ago

I like the change.

daniel-cussen 19y ago

I agree with the change. After a while, all the startup articles sound exactly the same. 10 tips for starting a startup...10 tips for dealing with VCs...what it takes to succeed...

Andys 19y ago

I think the new algorithm is going to make the site less adaptable to new concepts and ideas in the future, if a just few of the big users vote them down. The type of stories voted up high will get stuck at a local maxima in story space.

motivi 19y ago

Bad idea. What distinguished this site was the news on startups. If you want tech news there are hundreds of good sites out there. This becomes one more. Look at dzone, slashdot, and many more.