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>I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lot

>I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. Those threads are not useful in the sense of spawning civil discussions, but they may be useful in the sense that it keeps people heavily engaged on HN. I can imagine someone running HN thinking "Hmm, the site is kind of dead when the front page talks about Haskell but the site explodes when Apple and Microsoft fans wage war." From the point of view of someone (YC) trying to get as many possible eyeballs to look at their stuff (YC investments), allowing this sort of thing to continue seems like the logical choice. Are the raganwalds of HN going to leave because of flaming Apple threads? I doubt it. So it'll probably continue. Alright, enough conspiracy for one afternoon. :)

gue5t 14y ago
There is no need to artificially keep people engaged by encouraging useless, off-topic content. If it's necessary to dilute articles about intellectually worthwhile subjects in order to have them here at all, then this community should shrivel and die and let another better-designed, better-focused or better-populated one take its place. HN doesn't even run on ad money. I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers. Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.
- coderdude 14y ago
  It should be noted that Hacker News used to be called Startup News. That special blend of 'hacking' (programming) and entrepreneurship is what makes HN unique and worth having around. Once you leave that behind all you have is /r/programming.
  - gue5t 14y ago
    I'm aware of that, but programming is not the same thing as hacking.
    - coderdude 14y ago
      I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking is "tinkering" that directly involves programming. I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.
      - gue5t 14y ago
        To expound a bit more on what I said in my earlier post: the way I see it, hacking could be described as the 'outer edge' of computing/programming. Hacking is getting systems to do things they weren't intended to do. When that overlaps with a social environment the line does become very fuzzy, but for digital systems it ends up referring to programs that have some surprising and unexected attribute (examples include being tiny, being exceptionally fast, running on obscure, difficult, or new hardware, using new techniques or algorithms, being written in 'alternative' langauges [like brainfuck], performing unintended tasks [like privilege escalation or tetris-in-sed], and various others), and is more specific than "programming", which is increasingly often a very practical topic, as computers are embraced by more and more industries and fields. A "hack" is almost by definition, then, not for profit and not well-funded, because it is on the edge of what's possible and quite often far outside what's useful; good business knows better than to invest in high risk, low-return projects. Compare this with the idea of Y Combinator, which if I understand correctly funds companies with high-risk ideas in the hope of achieving high return-on-investment via runaway successes. But most YC companies I hear about have minimal technical progress associated therewith. Social progress seems more their goal, in the majority of cases. And please don't let it seem that I'm denigrating either mainstream programming nor funding ugly-ducking companies for social change. Hackers don't pop out of nowhere, and most can agree how important social change is. But I think it would be great to have a place to discuss hacking, and Hacker News definitely attracted many (myself included) via the implicit siren-call of being such a place. Given that it is so-named, we can work to make it live up to that standard, unless there's some other community I'm missing where such things would be more appropriate. If this is still exclusively Startup News: let pg rename it that, and don't waste hackers' headspace and search engine result space.

gue5t 14y ago

There is no need to artificially keep people engaged by encouraging useless, off-topic content. If it's necessary to dilute articles about intellectually worthwhile subjects in order to have them here at all, then this community should shrivel and die and let another better-designed, better-focused or better-populated one take its place. HN doesn't even run on ad money. I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers. Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.

coderdude 14y ago
It should be noted that Hacker News used to be called Startup News. That special blend of 'hacking' (programming) and entrepreneurship is what makes HN unique and worth having around. Once you leave that behind all you have is /r/programming.
- gue5t 14y ago
  I'm aware of that, but programming is not the same thing as hacking.
  - coderdude 14y ago
    I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking is "tinkering" that directly involves programming. I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.
    - gue5t 14y ago
      To expound a bit more on what I said in my earlier post: the way I see it, hacking could be described as the 'outer edge' of computing/programming. Hacking is getting systems to do things they weren't intended to do. When that overlaps with a social environment the line does become very fuzzy, but for digital systems it ends up referring to programs that have some surprising and unexected attribute (examples include being tiny, being exceptionally fast, running on obscure, difficult, or new hardware, using new techniques or algorithms, being written in 'alternative' langauges [like brainfuck], performing unintended tasks [like privilege escalation or tetris-in-sed], and various others), and is more specific than "programming", which is increasingly often a very practical topic, as computers are embraced by more and more industries and fields. A "hack" is almost by definition, then, not for profit and not well-funded, because it is on the edge of what's possible and quite often far outside what's useful; good business knows better than to invest in high risk, low-return projects. Compare this with the idea of Y Combinator, which if I understand correctly funds companies with high-risk ideas in the hope of achieving high return-on-investment via runaway successes. But most YC companies I hear about have minimal technical progress associated therewith. Social progress seems more their goal, in the majority of cases. And please don't let it seem that I'm denigrating either mainstream programming nor funding ugly-ducking companies for social change. Hackers don't pop out of nowhere, and most can agree how important social change is. But I think it would be great to have a place to discuss hacking, and Hacker News definitely attracted many (myself included) via the implicit siren-call of being such a place. Given that it is so-named, we can work to make it live up to that standard, unless there's some other community I'm missing where such things would be more appropriate. If this is still exclusively Startup News: let pg rename it that, and don't waste hackers' headspace and search engine result space.