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There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who

• sandworm101 11mo ago
  The hackers are still here, lurking in the shadows. Bananas. They are just tired of being berated by fanboys anytime they criticize the will of the tech bros. There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.
  • danem 11mo ago
    Am I the victim of the algorithm? Because all I see on HN these days is people pessimistic about tech and society. The tenor here is overwhelmingly negative. Where are you seeing anyone defend big tech, tech bros, or any tech in general?
  • filoleg 11mo ago
    > There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas. That "AI slop replies" excuse you mentioned would only apply to the past 3 years at most (aka ChatGPT 3.5 release on Nov 30th 2022). While the grandparent comment's take felt true to my perception for at least the past 10-15 years, way before "AI slop replies" were even a remote concern.
• GardenLetter27 11mo ago
  Hackers should know the government is never on your side.
  • layer8 11mo ago
    Growth hackers aim for regulatory capture.
  • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > Hackers should know the government is never on your side Never is naive. Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems. Those systems can be influenced and sometimes controlled by various means. And those levers are generally available to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and motivation.
    • argomo 11mo ago
      In addition, hackers should know government is inevitable. Even in anarchy, governments spontaneously begin to form.
      • buildbot 11mo ago
        If I am not mistaken, the anarchist school of thought is okay with governance and even governments, but not with the concept of the state - an entity that exists to enforce governance with violence. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia I’m not 100% sure though. edit - a (vs. the) school of thought is more accurate.
        • xboxnolifes 11mo ago
          That may be one of them, but there isn't a singular anarchist school of thought.
          • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
            > there isn't a singular anarchist school of thought Would be oxymoronic if there were one.
            • mc32 11mo ago
              Isn’t that like saying there must be as many universes as theoretical physicists can think up? Slight maybe but it could also just be one.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • vkou 11mo ago
    Neither are the billionaires and their deputies who both own and run all the megacorps. 99% of the current AI push is entirely anti-hacker ethos. It is a race to consolidate control of the world's computing and its economic surplus to ~5 organizations. A few people do interesting stuff on the edges of this, but the rest of the work in it is anathema to hacker values.
    • arbol 11mo ago
      The client ai push has also enabled people to run local llama models and build products without those companies. Presumably there'll be more of this to come
      • vkou 11mo ago
        That's the 1%. It's the hair on the back of the elephant. Their capabilities will fall further and further behind models that need a billion dollars to train, and a supercomputer to run. You're making a faustian bargain.
  • NalNezumi 11mo ago
    A hacker should probably know that it's usually trade offs and blanket statements are very useless. Certain tools are good for certain tasks and situations, but bad for others. No free lunch and all that. If you make that blanket statement, you're definitely not a hacker (or just a novice). But you'd make a heck of a politician or tech bro salesman
  • purple_turtle 11mo ago
    That is an absolute nonsense. At minimum, government will be useful as defence against worse government. I know that some anarchist had dream of a stateless world, but it is not viable. And while I am not going to say that any government is ideal, many are better than USSR, Third Reich or Cambodia under Pol Pot.
    • int_19h 11mo ago
      Government != state. And the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. It can be a temporary ally, but you always have to be wary of it becoming strong enough because you can become its enemy tomorrow.
  • palata 11mo ago
    In a democracy, the government is its citizen. It sucks when you disagree with the majority of the voters, of course. But it's wrong to say that the government is against the majority of the voters: it was elected by them.
    • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
      A government or president can definitely be against its voters interests.
      • pbkompasz 11mo ago
        So the people should talk to their representative. A government becomes authoritarian not only because of an authoritarian leader, but also because of the enablers, people like the spineless Mike Johnson.
        • mrguyorama 11mo ago
          This is Mike Johnson's district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_4th_congressional_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_4th_congressiona... The people who voted for him are very happy with what he does and that's why they vote for him again. They voted 75% for trump. They don't want what you or I want.
          • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
            Well sculpted district shape.
      • palata 11mo ago
        Then that president should not be re-elected. Or it's the voters' fault.
• poszlem 11mo ago
  The truly "eternal" September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• bsimpson 11mo ago
  I don't know if it's a changing of the audience or a change in how people behave generally, but this place has been insufferable lately whenever anything remotely related to Donald Trump's administration comes up. One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any other comment section.
  • taurath 11mo ago
    It’s a difference in values. To some, the ends justify the means and human life has no inherent value and the world is zero sum, and to some, a lying malignant narcissist deciding who lives and who dies is a personification of evil. To some people, it’s literally a choice between that “lens of curiosity” and their families lives. But people for whom politics has never directly impacted them past a few % up or down in their paychecks can’t understand that, or feel safe in the idea that “they won’t come for me”.
    • voidhorse 11mo ago
      precisely this. cool detachment or disinterested curiosity around political events is the privilege of those comfortable enough to believe current politics won't affect them. These same people are also usually ultimately responsible for the apathy/failure to act and stop meaningful regime change before it's too late. I'd love to live in a world where one can neatly compartmentalize reality and view life-altering political shifts with "a lens of curiosity", but that isn't how the world works.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
  • rootusrootus 11mo ago
    Yeah I still remember my first interaction with a supporter back in 2016. It was startling, and the first hint I had that politics was about to shift abruptly.
  • 11mo ago
• pipes 11mo ago
  In the last few years I think sentiment on hacker news has shifted from libertarian leaning to much mored left leaning. The same happened on Reddit a few years before. Anyway, just my gut feeling, nothing scientific.
  • bitpush 11mo ago
    Keen observation both you and OP. We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming. Valid criticism is OK (I stand by crypto being a scam) but bring up any topic that is neutral to popular(VR, Autonomous Driving, LLM) and people are first to be luddites come out.
    • aylmao 11mo ago
      > We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming. IMO this is simply because the tech industry isn't what it was 20+ years ago. We didn't have the monopolistic mammoths we have today, such ruthless focus on profiteering, or key figures so disconnected from the layperson. People hated on Microsoft and they were taken to court for practices that nowadays seem to be commonplace with any of the other big tech companies. A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial; but with time these "futures" the tech industry wants us to imagine have just gotten either less credible, or more dystopic. A future where everyone is on Facebook for example sounds dystopic, knowing the power that lays on personal data collection, the company's track record, or just what the product actually gives us: an endless feed of low-quality content. Even things that don't seem dystopic like VR seem kinda unnecessary when compared to the very tanginble benefit the personal computer or the internet brought about. There are more tangible reasons to not be optimistic nowadays.
      • Terr_ 11mo ago
        > A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial I like to frame it in terms of capital goods, even if I didn't think of it at that time: The personal computer's promise was that everyone would own their own digital foundry and factory, creating value for them, controlled by them, and operating according to their own best interests. Nowadays, you're just renting whatever-it-is from BigCorp, with massive lock-in. A tool for enacting other people's decisions at you.
• nofriend 11mo ago
  This is such a laughable comment. Being in favour of a regulation - any regulation - is not part of the "hacker spirit". A hacker qua a hacker is interested in a regulation insofar as they can work around it, or exploit it to their ends, not to put one in place to directly achieve something. That's not to say all regulations are bad, or even that the GDPR is, just that HN being for or against it isn't proof of some demographic shift.
• pixxel 11mo ago
  [dead]
• mmooss 11mo ago
  > we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?
  • radicalbyte 11mo ago
    > Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular? Absolutely! It's just that the hopeful hacker/nerd culture used to be more dominant here (slashdot had the more cynical types). Now there are a generation who don't know anything but Javascript but think that they're God's gift to programming. I can understand it as ZIRP resulted in the bar being dropped to the floor for jobs which paid SV salaries. Imagine earning that kind of money straight out of school and all you had to be able to do was implement Fizzbuzz. The hackers ARE still here as are some really amazing people but this always seems to happen with communities. The only constant is change. And without change communities die.
    • mmooss 11mo ago
      This sounds too much like a 'good old days' argument, which is actually in the HN guidelines (something like, 'don't say HN is becoming Reddit').
      • UberFly 11mo ago
        No. It's reflecting on an overall culture that embraces taking chances. Even if 50% of those chances lead to failure it still beats the paralyzing fear of moving forward.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
• dewey 11mo ago
  As this is the message board of a VC fund it's not that surprising that it doesn't only attract hackers in the original sense?
• antoniojtorres 11mo ago
  True that. I went to a building in SF that dedicated floor space to every adjacent field like robotics, AI, crypto, etc. Zero hacking or even cyber related space. It made me feel kinda sad for a few days.
• fsckboy 11mo ago
  >a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick" your complaint was Unassailable Hacker® jwz's complaint about HN more than 10 years ago here's a link (many on HN complain that this is NSFW https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png since there are rarely complaints here that anything else is NSFW, I'd suggest people feel insulted by the message) the thing that has actually changed since jwz's disgust is the site is now flooded by socialism, the antithesis of get-rich enthusiasm
• morshu9001 11mo ago
  As a hacker, I don't care about cookies or what the EU thinks about them. Disable them if you really care. Or at least use a browser that blocks 3P cookies (not Chrome).
  • jterrys 11mo ago
    people still insist on using a browser built by a company that makes money off of ads and act surprised when said company purposefully compromises their privacy and data on said browser.
  • Terr_ 11mo ago
    What about when the lack of cookies makes everything break and you cannot work around it because it's too much JS to reverse-engineer, and/or it's a copyright-felony in your country to develop workarounds? "I'll use my l33t hacker skillz to avoid it on my own" is a losing strategy in the long run. A similar thing happens with the proliferation of cameras and license-plate readers.
    • morshu9001 11mo ago
      You can keep them enabled and clear at end of session. I'm not saying this makes you untrackable; that is a losing strategy due to all the non-cookie tracking, but also the cookie popup isn't helping there.
  • GJim 11mo ago
    > As a hacker, I don't care about cookies Well I care about privacy. And so should anybody with an ounce of common sense.
• cma 11mo ago
  It always had a lot of that, I would say 2-3% of articles were about SEO in the early days of HN. It was never slashdot.
• Terr_ 11mo ago
  Some of that is attributable to raw inflow/outflow differences, where newer cohorts are bigger and therefore the blend would shifts even if no oldsters ever left.
• matheusmoreira 11mo ago
  The "hacker spirit" is dying. Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers. It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.
  • jack_pp 11mo ago
    I might get worried when mainstream computers won't be able to run Linux. Until then.. I'm not worried. Seems there are efforts to bring openness to platforms that inherently have an interest to resist it and while the progress is slow.. there is progress
  • cons0le 11mo ago
    >The "hacker spirit" is dying This is the number one issue in computing today. Everybodys running around trying to get rich building shitty extensions and frameworks without looking at the bigger picture. We need collective action. Imagine a movement where everybody becomes millitant about adblockers. Like install them on every computer and deflate the advertising industry. Smarter people than me can probably think of better ideas Right now its death by 1000 cuts. There needs to be a big change or we could lose everything in just 20-30 years in my opinion
• testfrequency 11mo ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I’ve said it before, but the cynicism and weirdness that used to exist here has been gobbled up by a new wave of early stage tech evangelists who are just here to complain about ladders and levels. It’s honestly been depressing to watch lots of good comments and posts go unnoticed, while the bait comments get all the engagement. There’s also weirdly (ok, maybe not that weird) amount of casual hate on here now. It’s subtle, but I’ve been seeing a lot of negative karma and rhetorics that never used to exist here. I suppose it’s just “the internet” these days, but I’d wager HN has just grown too much outside the bubble it once was, and now we have a wide open door with lights vs the tiny alley way we once had.