

Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective? - hhm

"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot 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."<p>Do you think the current Hacker News fully achieves this? and the main question here: do you think this site really achieves keeping a good hacker community together?<p>(I'm not a native English speaker, sorry for grammar)
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pg
I'm cautiously optimistic. A lot of hackers I meet say that they read it. And
traffic continues to rise: we now get about 6500 unique visitors a day, and
about 65k pageviews.

~~~
robg
Thanks fantastic. Many, many thanks for creating and nurturing this community.

~~~
edw519
Yes! One of the few places I feel right at home.

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trekker7
It's pretty hard to focus on pure hacking (including interesting articles
_not_ about startups) when something glamorous like startups is on everybody's
minds. programming.reddit.com has been pretty good about sticking to pure
programming stuff, but perhaps as long as Hacker News is affiliated with Y
Combinator and the startup world, we'll never be able to build a pure hackers'
community... simply because startups are so cool and garner impulsive
interest.

Maybe there should be a separate hacker.news.ycombinator.org, similar to a
sub-Reddit?

Edit: Again, when I say "pure hacking" articles, I don't mean just stuff about
programming. I mean anything that is "generally interesting to hackers", like
jey mentioned in his comment.

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shayan
I would say it's a more useful tool to hackers that are interested in starting
their own business... so useful to startup founders (or to-be founders) ... if
you are doing your homework, many of the news you read here you might have
already seen in your RSS reader, _but_ I think you can sense the feel of
community and how its different with all the other alternatives that are out
there, when you see postings that are mostly tagged by _Ask YC_ (I mostly mean
postings like this one that is not linked to an article and is starting a
discussion) ... The community here is definitely unique, and when discussions
begin you can take advantage of who is here, their knowledge and experiences

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schmoe
I don't think so, at least not hackers who are programmers. Most of the
interesting links seem to be cross-posted from programming.reddit.com and
receive relatively few upvotes.

I know a number of very good hackers and not a single one reads
news.ycombinator.com. Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even
bother with sites like this or reddit. You will however find a number of them
posting on Lambda the Ultimate, and a few on programming.reddit.com.

My gut feeling is that news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the
technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented
hackers.

Here is a list of the top 10 items as I edit this post:

1\. Number of founders - statistics 163 points by fauigerzigerk 2 days ago |
34 comments

2\. Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital (pmarca.com) 30 points
by henning 16 hours ago | 16 comments

3\. Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live
(heroku.com) 19 points by chaostheory 13 hours ago | 6 comments

4\. Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder! 88 points by BitGeek 2 days ago | 92
comments

5\. The Talent Myth, by Malcolm Gladwell (newyorker.com) 3 points by hhm 2
hours ago | 1 comment

6\. Modern Lisp (with support for concurrency) based on Java Virtual Machine
(sourceforge.net) 10 points by riobard 11 hours ago | discuss

7\. Performance-pay Perplexes (newyorker.com) 25 points by davidw 1 day ago |
5 comments

8\. Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective? 2 points by hhm 1
hour ago | 3 comments

9\. Exercise on the Brain (nytimes.com) 29 points by jlhamilton 1 day ago |
discuss

10\. Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail
(arstechnica.com) 8 points by muriithi 12 hours ago | 2 comments

I'd say #6 is the only item of technical interest and not a single comment!

~~~
pg
The goal is not to have just articles about hacking, but articles of interest
to hackers. We're not trying to make something like programming.reddit.com,
but something like www.reddit.com was in 2006.

~~~
chaostheory
to me Hacker News will always be Startup News =)

~~~
akkartik
Lots of my friends still don't read this because it hasn't "sunk in" that it's
not just startup news anymore. With perhaps detrimental effects to the pool of
submissions - it's not quite reddit.com '96 yet.

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anaphoric
I like scientific and business posts. I also like the posts where people talk
about specific problems their start-ups are facing.

But I really don't want to hear discussions of politics and religion,
especially when they degrade into flame wars. I think there are plenty of
other places on the web that people can do that if they are interested. And
trust me I have done my fair share. But I don't think Hacker News is the
proper forum.

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pauljonas
Hacker News seems to have more a MBA/VC bent than "hacker"... ...all of the
interesting software design/programming articles seem to be lifted from
programming.reddit.com. Discussions on languages, architecture, UI, etc....

~~~
rams
Actually that's changed quite a bit, since it became hacker news.

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jey
There's far too little non-hacking stuff. I like to code just as much as the
next guy, but really, I don't need to read 100 programming and Web 4.0 startup
related articles each day. We need more of the "generally interesting to
hackers" type of link, and less of the "directly about hacking" type of link.

I'd like to see interesting and stimulating articles on topics within math,
biology, sociology, philosophy, economics, etc. I don't mean dry academic
articles, but stimulating articles that look at the implications from these
fields, observations that affect our understanding and perception of how the
universe works. I also enjoy looking at and discussing the Big Questions out
there. I tried submitting some stuff relating to my current interests, but
they don't seem to get picked up. I think that since this community was seeded
as a startup/hacking community, that's the area where we have the most
overlap, and those articles get voted up the most. But I bet there's a bias
against even clicking on the non-hacking articles that show up on the "new"
page.

It would also be nice if the articles on hacking itself were deeper and more
technically interesting, but I understand that's not likely to happen, as the
audience shrinks as you get technically deeper/specific.

Some random examples of what I consider "Big Questions"

\- How harmful is religion?

\- What's consciousness?

\- Do you need consciousness to build a thinking machine?

\- Is math invented or discovered? (maybe there's not much disagreement on
this, but I've met at least one person who vehemently disagrees with me)

\- Is a technological singularity likely?

\- What is the thing I refer to as "I"? How much of "me" can you cut away and
still have "me" left?

\- What are the evolutionary pressures that made us the way we are, and how
have these pressures affected us?

~~~
kkim
I voted this up because I agree with the first paragraph, but I don't like
most of the specific big questions you list here.

I can't think of any way of saying this without sounding mean, but the type of
big questions you list here are the stuff of pseudo-intellectuals. These are
_Omni_ magazine big questions (if anyone here remembers that). I'd prefer
_Economist_ big questions.

~~~
jey
A question being permanently unanswerable or currently out of reach (or "too
big") doesn't make it a poor question. I agree that academics focus on
questions at the edge of reach with currently available tools, and that's fine
and important from a practical standpoint. But I don't think that the validity
of the question is determined by whether or not we currently have the tools to
attack it. If you're interested in the important political and economic
questions that face us today, that's fine, and I agree that in practice it's
more immediately valuable to debate and resolve those questions. But I do
think that the larger (and possibly unanswerable) questions are interesting to
ponder. Maybe I picked a poor list as I wrote the original comment, but as the
sibling poster said, the types of questions asked at edge.org are what I'd
like to see more of.

I'm surprised that everyone is responding to my list of questions instead of
the meat of the post. I just threw that list out there as an illustrative
list, the real point I'm trying to make is in the body of the post. I also
think that all of those questions I listed have mostly settled answers in
academia that aren't popularly accepted by society. (e.g. people still cling
to the idea of a "soul" separate from the information content of your brain)

EDIT: I also think that the most interesting work happens when asking
questions that are at the edge of being taken seriously.

~~~
Goladus
I highly recommend reading up on linguistics, if you're interested to know why
people responded the way they did:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics>

Writing is hard.

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rapind
Works for me. I pop by daily and can relate to the community. As it gets
bigger, the community will change which will completely change the content.
This is a good thing though, even if it ceases to interest me. It's still
doing what it should.

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edw519
I thought the primary purpose of Hacker News was to give yc additional data
for their decision making process twice a year. You can tell a lot about a
person from their comments here.

~~~
pg
It's not the primary purpose, just an additional advantage. The original
motivation was simply that we needed it ourselves. We'd funded so many people
that it was getting awkward to pass around links by email.

~~~
edw519
OK. Just in case I ever apply, my insightful comments are a true reflection of
myself. My stupid comments were probably made by my evil twin who has the same
login and password, but will not be my co-founder.

~~~
shayan
I just looked through your comments...it appears your evil twin has been a lot
more active than you (j/k)

~~~
edw519
I have been. When he's busy refactoring my mess, I come here.

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frameworker
It would help if you had the lead of the article (or the whole thing) visible
in your RSS feed.

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rokhayakebe
Good question. I must admit that I was against the change in the first few
days, but slowly i started to learn more through links that related to
science, philosophy and even architecture. There are still some parasite
links. If you open your house to everyone you can rest assure that some people
(who love disorder) will walk in and try to destroy it. Overall I still like
HackerNewsNetworks and although I am not a Hacker I can still acquire a
tremendous amount of knowledge.

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DanielBMarkham
This question doesn't have a yes/no answer. The content changes each day, as
does the audience.

So far, I'm here. So it works for me. So far. Ask me again in another month or
two.

As far as I know, this is Paul's baby, written in his language and tweaked
according to his goals. He's going to tweak it to make the content match what
he likes. So far, we seem to like some of the same stuff. Hopefully that
pattern will continue.

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mroman
As a reader, I would like to see:

\- Book reviews and recommendations

\- Software reviews and recommendations

