I'm not a hacker, and actually don't even remember how I ended up here some day back in August 2009. I was one of those for whom the term "hacker" had a negative connotation.
I'm a designer and I didn't understand 90% of the topics discussed here. But the reason why I stuck around and why HN eventually became my most visited site, is the community's quality. Comment threads usually spawn multi-leveled discussions with various but not radical opinions about a topic. The top comment can slightly favor point A while its top answer moderates the tone with or without contradicting it. The result is a a discussion with various shades while most comment threads on other websites are generally black or white and favor one-liner jokes to in-depth opinions.
I believe Digg was still around in 2009 but was mostly focused on offbeat news. Slashdot never appealed to me. And even though reddit covers a lot of topics, the community isn't really open to discussion and/or criticism.
Although HN is mostly a tech news site, it oddly taught me more about arts, politics, business and lifestyle than any other website. I guess quality can't restrict itself to one single topic.
I agree with you 100%, but I come from the other side. There are just enough articles on design and business to give me additional perspective and knowledge, but not too many that I lose interest or have a hard time filtering them out.
I've only been around here for about two years. Before that, I kept up on reddit. I still use reddit regularly, but limit myself to a small selection of subreddits.
I have a love-hate relationship with HN. On one hand, I love the insight I get in technical issues as also in business matters in general. I also like the fact that there is a certain level of respect in different views which you don’t often see in public forums especially technical ones. I rarely happen to see inflammatory comments. And I love the simplicity of the design. Sure it leaves a lot to be desired but in a functional level it’s just brilliant. You get the content which is the important thing without any fluff.
From the other hand, my most productive days/weeks is when I stop reading it altogether. It’s like a black hole that sucks you into an alternative reality and you lose focus of your priorities. There are times when I check it three or four times daily and this hammers my productivity a lot.
Either way, I consider it the most important community in the IT world right now and one of the best all around.
For me, HN has had one very big, very concrete effect: it's forced me to write more. Not write well, necessarily. Not edit, unfortunately. But write. Before I started commenting here, I only ever wrote coherently for school and never liked it. Now, after quite a bit of practice, I'm much more comfortable getting my ideas across.
This reminds me of "How to Write without Writing"[1] by Jeff Atwood. He explains how StackOverflow tricks programmers into writing more and therefore improving. While I love StackOverflow, I think Hacker News does this much better: StackOverflow posts tend to be too short and too technical, while HN posts are all over the place. HN also gives much more direct feedback: in my experience, voting is correlated with how well a comment is written and people's responses to a comment show where it was effective and where it could have been clearer.
Here are some things I like which some may not: I really like the "general geek interest" articles that usually make their way to the front page on weekends. I like political threads (that mostly concern directly or indirectly big government vs. free market). I like those threads not because they're constructive in any way, but because they provide an insight into the psyche of Silicon Valley. As an amateur historian I think some of those articles and discussions are bona fide historical texts (like that video from Startup School of the guy who suggested Silicon Valley should secede from the US). I also post on these threads occasionally – not because I think I might convince anyone, but because I think many of the readers here are very young, or unfamiliar with non-American culture, and it would do them good to hear other opinions. I also like heated arguments over programming languages. I know they inevitably turn religious, but I don't mind; they're fun if you're in the right mood, and I figure that anyone not in the mood for religious language wars won't read the thread anyway.
This is something I don't like, which some probably do: I wish HN were less biased towards web technologies and tools that are mostly applicable to fast-moving startups. Of course, this is the nature of the community and is to be expected. But I do wish there was more on embedded, enterprise, real time and game development. The problem with this bias is that I am sometimes swayed and mistakingly think that HN represents the "software development community", which, of course, it doesn't in the least. I need to remind myself that web companies are a small minority of software developers, and that IBM, Oracle and SAP employ more people than Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Netflix combined, ten times over. And that's not even counting large organization IT departments and defense. So whenever I get a sense of "so that's what's everyone is doing" on HN, I need to remind myself that the community is far from representative (although it does tend to be composed of early adopters).
"I wish HN were less biased towards ... fast-moving startups ... I do wish there was more on embedded, enterprise, real time and game development."
I agree with you in general but specifically its not an either or relationship. I wish there were more coverage of fast moving start-uppy entrepreneur topics in the embedded and game fields.
So there's a small company called micro-nova in Detroit (Detroit?) that ships a nifty little xylinx dev board in a DIP-40 form factor and I love the idea. I have no connection with these guys personal or economic just bringing up as an example of fast moving entrepreneur small business startup-py type embedded story not covered on HN.
Pretty much everything adafruit, evil mad scientist, and dangerous prototypes does should get a story on HN by the above criteria.
Spiderweb software recently (like last week) released their most recent game Avadon 2 an awesome deep little RPG. Admittedly it is not a "new tech" story because their focus is on story and gameplay, which is excellent. As far as entrepreneurship goes, spiderweb is basically one dude. Again no personal or economic connection to me, just an example of something that should be on HN but isn't.
X-Plane, another one man entrepreneur did get some minimal coverage on HN when he got sued by some patent trolls for basically porting his simulator to Android. So HN is not entirely devoid of all entrepreneurial gaming news, just mostly.
Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?
> Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?
I don't know if this is an actionable problem, as it depends on the interests of the community, which are, in turn, governed by who they are and what they do. If other types of developers join HN in large numbers, the situation might change, and it will benefit even web-based SV startups, too.
But there's another problem. A few years ago I was working for the defense industry, and hadn't even heard of HN. We were doing distributed, fault tolerant systems with graceful degradation – things that have since become very interesting for "web" (in the wide sense) developers. Obviously, much of the work done there is classified, but even the parts that aren't don't get discussed much because that community hardly blogs at all.
So it's not just a function of what gets submitted or upvoted, but of what "content" (how I loathe that word) is out there, and developers in other industries just don't write of their experience as much (which is a shame because we could all benefit from that). Once in a while we're very lucky to have some technology leak from the often maligned (here on HN) "enterprise". Look how much we've learned from Erlang, that for years was the sole domain of telecom. Or Clojure, which is a result of Rich Hickey's experience in projects that are very far removed from web startups.
Click "new" on the orange menu bar across the top and scroll down looking for what I recently posted. You are right, some of these FPGA technologies should get more coverage because a lot of hackers could build cool startups around hardware as well as software. But don't complain about it. Find articles on cool stuff and submit them. Many will be ignored but eventually people will catch on that there is something worthwhile in hardware hacking. Just keep plugging away at it.
> But I do wish there was more on embedded, enterprise, real time and game development.
I guess that is everyone's bias towards the home turf. I wish there would be more biotechnology, chemical technology, etc.
But I must admit that I am greatly surprised how many of those folks can be found here. The diversity, culture and competence of the HN community is really something.
When I first came across HN (around the time I started programming), I was a bit overwhelmed and intimidated upon seeing the projects/people/success stories in the community. I spent a lot of time just reading before I started posting. I've heard other people express similar thoughts.
Eventually, I just decided to start posting - there is no need to "wait" until you have a certain skill/expertise in an area. You can still make valid contributions to the discussion (of course, please read the posting guidelines).
So any lurkers out there, I encourage you to stop lurking and join the community. I did - and have consequently met many interesting people through HN and learned a lot of new things.
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On another note, the only group of people that seem to get tech/"internet" related (being purposely vague here) news faster than HN is people who use Reddit. I've had many conversations with friends who use Reddit where I will say "Hey, did you hear about X?" and they respond "Yeah, I already saw it Y hours ago on Reddit." Usually the difference isn't very large.
Interesting, I'm at 1084 days so I missed a chance at a round-number-blog-post.
I would echo many of the same things. I graduated with a computer science degree (and computer systems engineering) but up until about a year ago I had not written a single program. I've started kicking around with Python again, have signed up for Coursera courses that involve Github, AWS, and programming. As well, it's helping me professionally because I'm gradually moving away from VoIP technologies into datacenter networking where Dev Ops, AWS, IaaS, and the latest programming trends are important. I got an Arduino and started hacking around with it as well.
Even though I'm not at a startup, I try to treat my job with the same type of entrepreneurial spirit as those touted in the Silicon Valley Startup Echo Chamber posts. I try to keep in mind many of the core entrepreneurial concepts - fail fast, iterate, A/B test, get feedback, focus on value, user experience is paramount, etc in mind with my comparatively tame 'cushy' corporate job.
Just checked for and I joined 8 days prior to you. 1092 so far.
I remember stumbling upon HN a few months prior and initially was wondering the 'hacker' part but for whatever reason my google search for a few weeks was always redirecting me to some HN threads one way or another.
Wow, site is hosed already. It's probably a good idea to do some basic load testing on your site before submitting a link ;)
Anyway, this is day 1130 for me. Before here I was on Slashdot, but had largely stopped using it before that. All its weaknesses and rough edges aside, to me HN is simply the most worthwhile forum I've ever been on.
I get most of my tech news from here, it has largely replaced RSS to be honest, it's a great place to see what smart people are up to right now, and finally it often provides content in the discussions that surpasses the content of the original article. I also enjoy discussions with smart people who don't necessarily agree with me (as long as it's civil).
One of its most valuable properties is the fact that it doesn't really matter (that much) who you are. HN gives virtual nobodies like me the chance to interact with extremely talented people and I'm really grateful for that.
I bounced off of HN a bunch of times before settling in. But once I understood what I had found, my life has thoroughly improved. This is because, despite HN's flaws, and some aspects of this community, the comments that I read here give me the one thing I've always been looking for in a general news site, and that's clarity.
Reading comments on HN is like having wallhacks turned on. Spend enough time with this community and you start to see the world in a whole new light.
Reddit is just one-liner/image/jokes one-upmanship. Speciality forums are too focused to serve as a daily news site. Main stream tech news is always late to the party, and often has insights that are either pointless or incorrect. LessWrong is just irritating and full of long winded blow hards.
HN is the right mix of diversity, intelligence and news volume.
HN reminds me of the early days of Slashdot - news before it breaks elsewhere, a good-natured and interesting community, me karma-whoring when I should be working... :)
Something I strongly appreciate about HN is self promotional posts are honest about self identifying as advertisements. Hey HN look what I made...
Also /. appeared to have, formally or informally, scheduled topics if nothing is going on then its time to post the (paid for?) 3 articles per week about e-ink, or now its time for the daily apple article, etc. So for anyone other than noobs you had to filter them out. There are topics repeated on HN but at least they're random-ish and not apparently off a strict calendar. Hmm... pageviews down today, time to post a BSD/GPL flamewar to stoke the fires, etc.
It probably was a bigger deal, but it was also a very different time. The Internet has now been swallowed by mainstream ideology and corporate culture, so it's not really possible to compare the two.
"Wow we received a tremendous amount of connections to our blog and our sql database needs more energy. We'll be back in an hour. Thanks for being patient !"
I write C (rot13 my username), Python and a bit of Javascript, and I am currently doing an accountancy course. The hacking is not in a professional context.
Not that much on C (but I'm not really surprised, I get the impression it is becoming occult knowledge/black_art);
As someone who joined 2 days ago it seemed you have got what I hope to get out of HN, thank you for your insights. I can't help to feel there are times where you would have said the complete opposite about this?
Actually, not so much. I was really hooked right from the start and while I had a couple of frustrations now and then, I never really left HN and kept a strong interest in it. Do hang on, even if you don't understand most of topics at first.
Its a nice positive self-improvement post, but I'd be interested in what the OP thinks has changed over that time re tone, content, titling, policies etc and everything meta.
Well, there is definitely some trend to see more general, non-hacking related topics featured on the front page of HN in the past year or so. I think everyone is well aware of that, and that is expected when a social community grows in size, while the karma restrictions and flagging somehow help to keep a certain order, I believe.
The creativity around the posts titles is also mostly gone in recent history, because of the application of new policies. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.
In terms of the tone, I'm not sure how it has changed. It may be just me, but it seems to me there is more swearing and ad hominem than before in some discussions... while I think it used to be more civil before. But it may just be an impression, again.
Yeha, Show HN is a great way to get feedback and I do pay close attention to these kind of posts as well. It kind of validates the potential user interest, too.
I'm a designer and I didn't understand 90% of the topics discussed here. But the reason why I stuck around and why HN eventually became my most visited site, is the community's quality. Comment threads usually spawn multi-leveled discussions with various but not radical opinions about a topic. The top comment can slightly favor point A while its top answer moderates the tone with or without contradicting it. The result is a a discussion with various shades while most comment threads on other websites are generally black or white and favor one-liner jokes to in-depth opinions.
I believe Digg was still around in 2009 but was mostly focused on offbeat news. Slashdot never appealed to me. And even though reddit covers a lot of topics, the community isn't really open to discussion and/or criticism.
Although HN is mostly a tech news site, it oddly taught me more about arts, politics, business and lifestyle than any other website. I guess quality can't restrict itself to one single topic.