4 ms·

> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes... HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on

> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes... HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE. Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result. The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date. Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.

orangeboats 2mo ago
Non-American here... what is DACH?
- greyb 2mo ago
  It is Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
  - orangeboats 2mo ago
    Thanks! I must admit this is the first time I have heard of the acronym.
    - overfeed 2mo ago
      Interesting, I imagined it is behind only EMEA, APAC in terms of notoriety as a geographic, multicountry market segment
  - Tomte 2mo ago
    Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registration_code#Current_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra...
- slater 2mo ago
  Germany, Austria, Switzerland (D, A, CH)
  - em-bee 2mo ago
    D, A and CH are the international vehicle registration codes for those countries among other things. and "dach" as a word means "roof", which makes it memorable. some more fun facts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_German_speakers#German-speaking_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G...
greyb 2mo ago
>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH. I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
- alephnerd 2mo ago
  > I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH. The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-, French, and Polish-native speakers are increasingly prominent (eg. periods and spaces instead of commas in numbers, spacing between quotation marks and words, failing to use context clues to infer timezone), and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase. HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well. I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012. [0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
  - Avicebron 2mo ago
    How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?
    - AlotOfReading 2mo ago
      Haven't seen anyone sending partiful invites here.
      - fragmede 2mo ago
        Course not. Everyone cool moved over to Luma because Partiful got those Palantir vibes.
handwarmers 2mo ago
the fact that this comment is getting downvoted into oblivion instead of discussed is poignant enough. fwiw, my experience is similar. hn has not been about startups, vc funding, or anything in that space for quite a while. to paraphrase a classic, this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.
- bigbadfeline 2mo ago
  > this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading. Well, this place (wherever you are) is like a memory of the world we used to love, and the memory is fading... Definitely true too. You can't expect a place tightly connected to a changing world to stay the same.
- nottorp 2mo ago
  The "AI" spam is significantly more prevalent than the blockchain spam used to be, but HN has always had its spam waves. Blockchain is all but dead, even the "i've rewritten this thing, it has far less features but it's IN RUST" spam has greatly reduced.
jdw64 2mo ago
[dead]
GPerson 2mo ago
How is it not tech bro centric when every third thread is about some new feature of a random Anthropic product?
snowpid 2mo ago
" HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE. " I like to encounter discussions about German digital health system or the German start up system or neo2. I've never seen them so I doubt it. Also almost no debates about Polish stuff (Hello neigbours!)

orangeboats 2mo ago

Non-American here... what is DACH?

greyb 2mo ago
It is Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
- orangeboats 2mo ago
  Thanks! I must admit this is the first time I have heard of the acronym.
  - overfeed 2mo ago
    Interesting, I imagined it is behind only EMEA, APAC in terms of notoriety as a geographic, multicountry market segment
- Tomte 2mo ago
  Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registration_code#Current_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra...
slater 2mo ago
Germany, Austria, Switzerland (D, A, CH)
- em-bee 2mo ago
  D, A and CH are the international vehicle registration codes for those countries among other things. and "dach" as a word means "roof", which makes it memorable. some more fun facts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_German_speakers#German-speaking_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G...

greyb 2mo ago

>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH. I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.

alephnerd 2mo ago
> I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH. The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-, French, and Polish-native speakers are increasingly prominent (eg. periods and spaces instead of commas in numbers, spacing between quotation marks and words, failing to use context clues to infer timezone), and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase. HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well. I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012. [0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
- Avicebron 2mo ago
  How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?
  - AlotOfReading 2mo ago
    Haven't seen anyone sending partiful invites here.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      Course not. Everyone cool moved over to Luma because Partiful got those Palantir vibes.

handwarmers 2mo ago

the fact that this comment is getting downvoted into oblivion instead of discussed is poignant enough. fwiw, my experience is similar. hn has not been about startups, vc funding, or anything in that space for quite a while. to paraphrase a classic, this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.

bigbadfeline 2mo ago
> this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading. Well, this place (wherever you are) is like a memory of the world we used to love, and the memory is fading... Definitely true too. You can't expect a place tightly connected to a changing world to stay the same.
nottorp 2mo ago
The "AI" spam is significantly more prevalent than the blockchain spam used to be, but HN has always had its spam waves. Blockchain is all but dead, even the "i've rewritten this thing, it has far less features but it's IN RUST" spam has greatly reduced.

jdw64 2mo ago

[dead]

GPerson 2mo ago

How is it not tech bro centric when every third thread is about some new feature of a random Anthropic product?

snowpid 2mo ago

" HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE. " I like to encounter discussions about German digital health system or the German start up system or neo2. I've never seen them so I doubt it. Also almost no debates about Polish stuff (Hello neigbours!)