Good points here. Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. PG and his cofounders invented the web app, using a combination of old tech (lisp) and new (the internet).
There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem.
“How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter.
Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.
Oh, for christ's sake. I don't want to get all "get off my lawn" but HN is full of early-20-somethings rediscovering things and calling them 'bleeding edge'.
The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.
Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today.
The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive...
Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.
Agreed. The article that opened my eyes to this shows (IMO) a serious deficiency in C#'s type system compared to F#'s, which includes the concept of tagged-union types. It shows a very simple shopping cart program that can't be modeled cleanly in c# without using the visitor pattern....which is difficult to read IMO.
These are the kind of comments that make HN so special: knowledgeable and insightful, due to deep experience with the past and critical understanding of the present. It isn’t just a rush to what is shiny and new, but is capable of identifying what is novel and valuable, and is articulate enough to explain why.
Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.
Current-day HN strikes me as very similar to early 00s Slashdot, albeit more self-serious and with an ideology more informed by SV capitalism/entrepreneurialism than the convoluted politics of open source software.
Hacker News ranks at #959 in the US. It didn’t get that rank from just being geared toward startups with Tier 1 engineers.
Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general.
We’re both making points based off anecdotal experience, so who knows. I have been a reader for the last 7 or 8 years, but my experience is just one subjective data-point.
Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.
HN archives are stored in BigQuery, so it would be possible to do an analysis that was more rigorous than a human reading the thousands of front pages to see a pattern of difference.
You are assuming "tier 1 engineers" are also the ones using the bleeding edge technologies. This is not true in my experience. The best developers care a lot about using the best tools available for a particular task - which is very different from using the newest tools avaialbe. In reality it typically takes a long time for a tool to become mature enough for productive use, at which point it is not cutting edge anymore.
In case of open source, everyone wants someone to (beta) test their solutions in production. Only after few years of that such testing a tech product becomes usable for the rest of the industry and thats when it becomes profitable.
Im not surprised the leaders of IT, ppl who create those new technologies, push for a narrative to use those new shiny things.
There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem.
“How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter.
Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.