Software is becoming less and less of a tech industry and more and more commoditized. Very little innovation in the past 5-10 years. Very few successful companies during that time have come about by having incredibly innovative and novel technology - almost all are simply using run of the mill, commoditized technology to solve business problems that they have large domain knowledge of. Given this, it makes total sense that having detailed esoteric technical knowledge is no longer the path to success in 2021, and ultimately, hacker news has always been predominately about one thing - how to get rich. The best methods have simply shifted over the last 15 years from being a tech genius to being technically-proficient domain knowledge expert
Perhaps this goes against most commenters here, but I find HN to be an appropriate mix of both that has not changed much with time. Reading that link of Hacker News from 15 years ago feels little different from what it is today. This contrasts dramatically with the Reddit of 10-15 years ago vs what it is like today.
Discussion here is also still very high quality. I find it remarkable.
I think as reddit continued to decline, more people here became interested in debating politics, societal stuff since there was no other "serious" place for it. I wish some of that stuff wasn't here, since it takes away from discussions in other threads.
But (and I hope dang sees this) occasionally when HN "strays" away from tech it's absolutely brilliant. There's tons of discussion here on some health issues, diets, stuff like that, where I would never have found such good discussion (even the anecdotal evidence is interesting and useful) and where you can really walk away being better off from having read it. If that means tolerating the occasional thread about how appropriate politics is in the workplace, or how bad everything is for mental health, I'm more than happy to keep coming back here for that.
edit: by the way, I'd be quite interested in what a thread like this posted 8 years ago would look like. Wouldn't be surprised if people were saying this website was "going downhill" too back then. I think as long as the 12-18 only-cares-about-memes demographic stays on reddit, HN will stay just fine.
This is strange, are we even reading the same front page? ( I am pretty sure HN dont have personalised front page )
I just ran through the first 100 Front page times and there are barely any business related news.
I also dont see how the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology. Other than some rare news on another Unicorn, Public Listing, earning from FAANG. There has rarely been any business news on HN at all.
There are some economics news ( if you count them as business news ), but are again in the minorities.
YC backed start up Jobs are only shown may be once per day. They are more like ads on HN. Who is hiring is also only a monthly posting.
I am actually in flavour of more business news, but I also think the current balance seems to be fine.
You can do an analysis of this, you don't have to rely on personal impressions. Download representative samples of the top hn posts over time. Use open source or free sample tools to classify the text of posts or titles and see how that has changed. You could even do a write up on the experience
If you think we don't talk about hacking enough, then give us something to talk about
There's a lot of stuff here about software that doesn't make the front page. I tend to scan the front page first and then go look at what's in the "new" section. There's a lot of good stuff there that doesn't generate a lot of comments that I follow the links provided.
I'll come back and leave a comment on some of those. But by the time I do they may be a page or two deeper and not much makes the front page if they haven't already by that point. A later post on the same subject might make the front page though. I've seen that happen a lot here.
That said, there's still a lot here about "software, hardware, computer science". As far as "hacker culture" goes I'm not really sure what that is.
It ebbs and flows. There was a time not so long ago where it seemed like every third article on HN was about yet another JavaScript framework.
I'd much rather read about a startup's postmortem than about some monads-as-a-service library releasing version 14.374.299
HN is HN. It ebbs and flows like the tide. I love HN for what it is, a news feed of interesting articles, with a bias towards technology but not always. I've been introduced to so many things because of the wide range of articles that are fascinating to like-minded people.
> I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here.
Feel free to upvote the articles that you enjoy. But forcing HN to only be about the above would probably lead to its demise.
Programmers aren’t interested in the same programming related topics because everyone is too specialized now. The topics I’d be interested in would be boring to someone else, etc. aside from stuff about elixir which we all geek out on. So general tech topics like dunking on Facebook/apple/surveillance tech and complaining about leetcode job interview headaches get much traction.
There is an alternate defintion of hacker, that of the "startup hacker" or "growth hacker," that this site seems to follow more closely.
Disappointing, for sure.
It is obvious to anyone who has been here for a while that this community is in decline, in the sense that it has less depth, less quirkiness, and less 'real' diversity of opinion (although dang does a good job of stemming the tide). The 'hivemind' has emerged here to squash contrasting positions.
The funny thing is, no one thinks they are a part of this emergent 'hivemind' but the end result is the same.
Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree,
"I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here"
That said, there is still a lot of that stuff. But the proportion of various topics have definitely shifted over the years.
Software & tech got boring & not worthy of discussing when it biggified & cowardly retreated to inside the corporate firewalls.
There's a lot less to talk about because it's all much more boring, much more is already on tap and available, much of what hacking is done is boring as heck now, inside the bowels of vast enterprises.
The hacker spirit is in jeopardy.
I post articles and deep-reads that I personally find interesting from all ranges of topics. I like hackernews because of the discussions and the comments.
Personally, I think the diversity of threads here is an asset. There was a front-page thread here on Ham Radio yesterday which I know nothing about but reading through the comments was fascinating!
Agree that sorting by /new and upvoting the content you like is hugely helpful.
I think it may be time for a userbase fork. All the politics, policy and economic, and general business news to one side, all the hardware, software, science, startup, and tech business news to the other.
What intrigues me is that the "Hackers", who care about state, programs, and process, haven't turned attention to the State, and set about un-jacking its programs and streamlining its process.
Why haven't we got a robust git server with anonymous read-only access for everyone who pays taxes that holds all (unclassified) legislation/regulation affecting society?
Commits would be possible for elected officials/appointees only.
Similarly transparent treatment for the tax code.
Come on, Hackers: let's beat the entropy out of (or at least minimize it) in the res publica.
There was a marked shift many years ago. SV seems to have recruited too many people, so inevitably the discussion shifts to the average worker. It's all about management now, so obscure hacking content will not be upvoted. It has also become too 'corporate' , focused on big tech and funding, and not the indie heroes. The comments have become more personal, in line with the me-culture of the time.
This is of course a subjective view coming from my observations that I often learn new management/marketing terms that i shouldn't be learning, being constantly perplexed by the career ladders mentioned, and learning about tools that are useless to anyone but google.
Also don't forget the constant shilling about various paid services that are the second coming of christ until the next second coming.
go to /new and upvote the stuff you want to see more of. Surprisingly few people seem to do so, and early voting has quite an effect.
The biggest drift I noticed is mainstream news articles reaching the front page more frequently. I use and abuse the "hide" functionality, but sometimes I wish there was a setting to hide bbc, reuters, new york times, npr, and the gang - like a "hide" feature for domain names.
Very surprised to see this post and thread... Actually feeling a bit happy and vindicated.
I pointed this out very recently and got downvoted heavily.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479960
I still believe that if the thread above can make it to the top then introspection is needed.
Peace.
"Hacker" isn't an absolute term. This site is what it is (a community). I think it's bizarre to make an appeal to a dictionary definition in order to shift the culture of said community. If you want to see more of X, Y, or Z, submit it. That's it.
I feel that HN has mostly been a business news site for the last 6 years, and has been trending into a more zeitgeist focused site in the last 2-3.
I've fulfilled my need for more technical discussions elsewhere for a while now.
One place I've liked is lobsters.
edit; I'll add that I've also started seeking out deep technical knowledge about a subject in the official places for the subject in question. For instance, for deep discussions on Kotlin I go for the KEEP and Slack channels.
This is the social media arm of a for-profit startup incubator business. The "hacker" is just corny branding, man
If only business news. A few months ago HN was flooded with articles about Navalny. There is quite a lot of this kind of political spam, from different countries.
I wonder if you’re affected by the “notice-dislike” bias the dang [1] often talks about?
Looking at the front page now, there are zero business news stories. At least 15 (half) are straight tech, and a further 8 are tech or science related. Of the remaining 6, one is about Covid-science, one is about tech-politics, one is about culture, one is a YC job listing, one is about HN 15 years ago and the last one is your complaining that there is not enough tech content here.
Sure there’s been a lot of content about Facebook scandals /outages this week, and maybe that’s what you’re focusing on.
But there is a “hide” button on each story, so you can always hide all the stuff that doesn’t interest you and just read the tech content, which always makes up more than half the items in the front page.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Before my time, but HN was originally called "Startup News" which is more-or-less business.
Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like.
It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers!
Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.
I find I have to flag/hide about a third of the front page every time I visit to filter out the really boring dreck. Most of it comes from a couple dozen of domains, like npr, guardian, washpost, nytimes, nature, cbc, cnbc, newyorker, atlantic, etc, which does make the filtering easier.
The biggest thing is just that after so many years here, there's very little new to discuss; most topics have been beaten to a bloody pulp, and you know what people are going to say before you even read the comments.
That's the very reason why I stopped following TechCrunch and HackerNoon. It stopped being about tech content and nowadays it's all about the next shiny unicorn or cryptocurrency, IPOs, VCs and interviews with CEOs that sound like TED talks.
Another signal of this direction of things: last year's HackerNoon prizes were for the best (individual) contributors (and back then I managed to grab one of them). This year they were all about the best startups. Why should I spend a few days to put together a comprehensive technical article that eventually doesn't get enough eyeballs because the network is more interested in boosting visibility for (often well-paying) startups and VCs?
I understand that the IT biz side is also important and we need to follow what's going on that side too. The problem is that the IT biz side is cannibalizing everything else and there aren't many large platforms with deep technical content left.
I also understand why things are going in this direction - sponsors and VCs pay better than individual contributors, and by diluting the technical content one widens the potential audience. But it's not a healthy trend for the IT industry. The best ideas come when many technical minds meet and speak in the same place, not when the talk is all about the next unicorn to invest on or the next scandal in <put the name of humungous IT company here>.
In the meantime, I've moved my content to my private blog, and many other technical writers have been doing the same. Going back to private blogs because your content doesn't get enough visibility on large platforms feels like moving back the clock of innovation by at least two decades though, and it's not a good thing.
It's not really surprising.
Engineering (which most programming is) is the economic application of scientific knowledge for human value/advantage.
Thus that implies several things:
• the core engineering is defined by economics, psychology, sociology, etc. at least 50% with technical/scientific knowledge/skills being the other 50%
• the money engineering generates is subject to human need and preference which is why the above liberal arts areas matter
• competitive value to the customer defines all projects, all hires and all salaries and decisions are only partially rational even with rational R&D, buying and selling processes
• factors that define the negotiation of value for price involve soft sciences which are messy but completely unavoidable. Those of us who "excel" in those areas have realized this and learned skills related.
• all of this is what "business" actually is!
• thus if you do software seriously, you also should be serious about business - this is analogous to Alan Kay's quote: "people who are serious about software should build their own hardware".
If you want "purity", become a scientist - nominally they don't care about anything but the purity/attainment of knowledge. But that alone does NOT pay well. That's why there are 200+ PhDs in physics waiting for each US tenured university position but companies doing engineering can't get enough and pay for that.
Science is only 100 years old as a profession. Engineering is many 1000s of years old because it has practical application which everyone else in society can easily agree to fund.
Hmmm...Maybe I just tune out the business stuff, but I mostly see topics relating to programming, science, and technology, with a smattering of pure business stuff and product/startup announcements.
I think this may be a taxonomic problem. Consider this topic:
> Facebook's own data is not as conclusive about teens and mental health [1]
The article is about Facebook, so its definitely a business article. But it also an article on technology and society, and about the science that describes how social media consumption effects mental health.
HN would lose something if it focused purely on technology. While its essential to understand how technology works, and what changes are on the horizon, the beauty of HN is it also explores how science and technology interconnect with business, government, society, culture, etc.
Seems like a trivial solution to include a mechanism for categorization. Good ole Slashdot has had this forever...
Adding tags/topics has been a constant requested workaround to allow some filtering since almost the begining of HN.
Never understood the rejection.
PS: I have always read that it opens mind to other subjects. When I have enough time I agree, but when very busy I would favor some filtering to save precious time.
"Rich people in their free time talk about art. Artists in their free time talk about money."
FYI, these are guidelines for "on-topic" for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a big difference in technology and business. Open source vs closed source. When you create a technology to solve a tech problem and you want kindness and share with the community like "Don't be evil". When you create a business, you want to earn as much money as possible for yourself and your investors and everyone wants too therefore competition is generated and everything is hidden
When you want make a technology you are fun like tech pioneers and when you want to the profit from a technology you are startup builder like PG, Musk, Gates, Bezos
Not saying it doesn't at times but right now this was #23 on my front page and it was the first business referencing submission. Everything else was tech stuff / OSS and a 99% invisible post.
I think hacker culture died in the early 2000s , it used to be that there was no money in hacker culture so it kind of attracted a certain person who wasn't interested in money or where it wasnt their main thoughts.
Now there are so many ways to make money , startups, Fang salaries, crypto, so money kind of dominates the thoughts
I have a theory that the current generation will kind of rediscover hacker culture when they hit their 40s and 50s and become financially independent and are no longer motivated by money and there will be a big resurgence.
I wish it was more business (and tech) news oriented.
All I see lately is a lot of culture war, partisanship, 'intersectionality' and other things they were rarer before the Trump era.
I remember a time when people were getting downvoted for suggesting that maybe, Airbnb and Uber should follow local laws, fast forward 5 years and it's a cultural battlefield...
I miss the time when we were just yelling at each other over the use of singletons, or whether POST or PUT were idempotent...
Try lobste.rs ( https://lobste.rs ) if you want "real" hacker news.
They punish non-technical submissions.
I think people want to browse HN and not have to put much mental effort in, so more "news" articles are upvoted, commented on, etc.
Hacker News is essentially entertainment. Nothing here is accurate, most voices are not speaking from experience but a sort of caricature role-playing.
There are occasionally helpful resources, all the same. There was a thread a few months back maybe of a list of different blog authors in various tech fields. If you want high-quality, informed, well-written news, you gotta curate it yourself.
Business news is fine; as pg once wrote, “ But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack.”
Hacking doesn’t have to be breaking computer stuff, it can also be finding loopholes in business and everyday life and exploiting them.
I imagine HN simply sells the front page to PR firms.
There is no better ad that the one that seems to be organically showing up in your circle of interest.
I wouldn’t describe it as business news, more like mainstream news. Over the last six months or so, I have noticed a massive increase in the downvoting of unpopular opinions. Before you had to be deliberately belligerent to get flagged or downvoted. Now it’s more just saying something the slightest bit controversial.
This is how Reddit operates and I am sad to see it taking over Hn too.
Engineering especially software just like DJing used to be for geeks. That's no longer the case, now it's become hip. Thanks to how easy it is to pick up coding these days. Look at the founders background at YC companies shift over the years. The issue is when there is lack of forums for geeks, we as a society stop innovating.
50 years since building my first heathkit radio with Dad on the kitchen table and I still love reading about the bleeding edge of silicon, algorithms, philosophy, development ideas, and anything else we all churn up. I appreciate the group effort behind HN and rely on YOU for a focus on things that really matter.
Thank you for all the hard work
Probably something to do with a lot of us becoming pawns in silicon valley's carefully orchestrated theater. Maybe combined with mass media grappling harder and harder for people's attention as their precious TV dies out. Looks like to be quite potent resulting in people posting a lot about politics and business.
I can't say I agree...look at the top 60 links currently. How many would you say are "business news"?
Fair point, but it's always been this way. It's not new. FWIW, HN is my tech/business news source so I love it the way it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
HN was originally called Startup News, and was for startup founders. You might like lobsters, in addition to HN, which has more of a programming focus and overlaps with the community here a bit https://lobste.rs/
To be honest I think this happens naturally and it's fine. The median age in the community feels older and more folks are working in management and business roles. Interests in a community ebb and flow in relation to what folks are working on these days.
In the guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
Because technology is basically business automation. Much less of coding is hobby or science.
Maybe it's because you cannot separate things that neatly. I see people here complaining that it's not all about tech but what is tech without the world that we live in and our effect on that world?
Without context, tech alone is a very sterile discussion.
I keep coming back to HN because of the informed commentary. I commonly see principal actors comment directly, as well as experts with direct relevant experience. I do think the worldview of commenters is a bit monolithic.
There's also the argument that business and technology is "the same thing" now. A majority of businesses cannot operate without technology. Technology often does not come to fruition without business.
I agree. At least 25% of topics are flame war political posts. If you have the wrong opinion you are downvoted. So it makes the community feel pretty bad. I would like to see a policy change. But I won't hold my breath.
I'm not sure if it's changed or not, but use this as an observation as a reminder that technology is more interesting when it does something for people, otherwise it's an academic exercise.
Because of that I had moved away a few years ago but a friend pointed to me that it is still worthwhile to scan 3 pages of links for the one relevant actual tech bit.
Maybe I should check out slashdot again...
Commenters here seem to be taking OP's assertion as gospel, but right now the front page has maybe 3 items on it that I'd call "business news".
It’s the cycle of life. At one time slashdot was where all the technical people hung out. I’m sure a new place will replace HN at some future date.
Yes. Posts like "How to make $1 million with embarrassingly little work" are always going to make it to the HN frontpage.
Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping?
Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Something feels not right.
Currently, looking at the front page, there is 1 story in the top 20 that is about business - that's about Facebook's business model.
HN it seems to me is very targeted towards the things that hackers are interested in, which is of course technical content but not exclusively.
I do have a similar perception though I would add there is often political stuff that is not of particular interest to me as a hacker.
I strongly disagree. Hacker news has strong measures to prevent it turning promotional, and it seems to be working
You have to know what the businesses are doing so you can emulate their success. Also adjust your stock portfolio.
Had the same thought when Rent the Runway's IPO was on the front page. They're not even a tech company.
Business very much is part of hacker culture, and is Very different in tech versus many other industries.
I've seen a lot of posts analyzing HN content. This would be a very interesting topic.
It's possible to go back through history and look at the front page (30 top articals) for any day in the (as of today) past 15 years, beginning 9 October 2006, when Startup News, now Hacker News, first launched as a service to the tech startup sector. A business-oriented site, focusing on the (mostly) high-tech venture scene.
5 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-10-09
10 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-09
15 years ago today: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
A simple shell script will automate URL generation:
for i in {5..15..5} do
echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=$( date -d "$i years ago" +%Y-%m-%d )"
done
2006: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1167523200&dateRange=custom&...
As 2006 is partial, here's 2007 as well:
2007: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1199059200&dateRange=custom&...
2011: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1325203200&dateRange=custom&...
2016: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483142400&dateRange=custom&...
2021: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1640908800&dateRange=custom&...
As I read it, the top stories from 2007 were ... dominated by business / non-technical topics. Top 10 items:
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363)
262 points|pg|15 years ago|1566 comments
Finally, voting without refresh(http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#12jun07)
176 points|pg|14 years ago|42 comments
How Not to Die(http://paulgraham.com/die.html)
168 points|subhash|14 years ago|143 comments
Why we made this site(http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html)
165 points|pg|15 years ago|57 comments
Hacker News(http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)
150 points|pg|14 years ago|76 comments
Holding a program in one's head(http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html)
142 points|eposts|14 years ago|131 comments
Code's Worst Enemy(http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html)
125 points|mqt|14 years ago|41 comments
CMU professor gives his last lesson on life(http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07262/818671-85.stm)
121 points|amichail|14 years ago|33 comments
Why to Apply to YCombinator
113 points|palish|14 years ago|36 comments
Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
112 points|BitGeek|14 years ago|86 comments"Hacker" "News"
(It's a somewhat obscure reference)
to be honest, it seems more dominated by retro-computing and various tech related nostalgia for the over 40 set at the moment.
not complaining at all about this, of course.
You might enjoy lobste.rs more for straight tech content.
funny how you see "How Google is protecting our privacy" posts eveyr now and then that makes it to the front page
"Hipster News"
its "hacker" as in "hacker is a cool word"
Hackernews hasn't been hacker news since 2015, when it started being about the books bill gates is reading, or what Elon Musk had for breakfast. It's vanity fair for nerds.
It is a stark contrast to 5 years ago.
Agreed. I think it's probably helped the lobste.rs community.
Didn’t this site start as a jobs and PR board for investment properties owned by venture capitalists?
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It's dominated by mainstream, intelligentsia-approved narratives.
It's PG's toy forum for the CEOs he's investing in. Of course it's dominated by business news.
Find professional workers for hire that are verified and can get your job done. Hire a professional hacker who is expert in all types of hacking.
And how about the constant bitching and moaning about capitalism, corporate taxes that are too low, and evil corporations in general, while at the same time upvoting digital nomad articles about ways to work remotely and pay less or no tax?
Or the constant praise for free software, while supporting all sorts of methods governments use to deny freedom to their citizens - from taxation to forced vaccination to 4 day work week?
It's the brogrammer echo chamber. They discuss everything and anything the people of silicon valley are interested in.
I’d say the opposite is true. Additionally, it is much MUCH easier to find tech communities to have a discussion as compared to business-oriented communities.
Look at the url 'ycombinator'. It's some kind of silicon valley tech-bro MLM I think.
I missed this thread completely, but these perceptions have basically been around as long as HN has. I don't believe the community is less technical than it used to be; if anything, the opposite, actually.
If you or anyone wants to see more posts of type X, the best thing to do is to find interesting links of type X and submit them.