
Why Paul? Why Did You Change It? (About Hacker News) - transburgh
http://www.centernetworks.com/y-combinator-hacker-news
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pg
Because we ourselves were bored with reading about nothing but startups. If
our site was boring to us, it was probably boring to the audience we intended
it for.

This is hard for business guys to understand, but the people who make the best
startup founders often don't care about business very much. Some of the most
successful companies started next year will be started by people who do not
currently plan to start companies.

~~~
dean
I don't like this idea. There are already many places on the net to find out
about hacking. But this is the only place I've found for good stories about
startups (of course, I stopped looking after I found this place). From what I
can see, there is much more to a startup than hacking. And there are more
kinds of people involved with startups than hackers. It is a disservice to the
startup community to change the focus here.

Besides, this site already has somewhat of a hacker focus anyway. Look at
these items from the top-ten at this moment: #3 Coding Horror: Discipline
Makes Strong Developers #5 Blueprint is a CSS framework #6 How to be a
Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary #9 We are living in
someone else's computer simulation

Not exactly business ideas.

And while you may be bored with reading this site, I don't see you as the
typical audience here. I see this site as being for people who are in startups
or thinking about doing a startup and who want to learn as much as they can.
Not for people who've already been through it and already know all this stuff,
like yourself. Even if Startup News began as your baby, I think you have to
let it go.

In short I think your initial premise is wrong. Just because you're bored,
doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.

~~~
pg
> Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.

We use ourselves as a proxy for the audience we want to visit this site. This
is reasonable, because we were the type of founder we like to invest in.

It may sound presumptuous to use yourself as a proxy for the audience, but
this is how a lot of good things came about: the Porsche 356, the Apple II,
Google.

~~~
greendestiny
And just to put a name to the audience, I'm very happy to see this change. I
was getting bored of the links, and really this site is about hackers making
things in startups. More than academia or open source projects, I think the
natural home of the hacker is the startup.

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nickb
I posted this in another thread: why not start a NEW website hackernews.org or
something and leave this site alone? Why mess with success?

This site is, after all, a subdomain of the YC site which is an early stage
investment firm. n.yc.com made sense since it dealt with YC company news
stories, VC investment, angel investment etc. stories. If you wanted to get
funding from YC or wanted to learn how VC investment procedure works, this was
a perfect complement to the main YC site. Now n.yc will become another reddit
and will get flooded with all kinds of nonsense and will get a lot of "how do
I haxor my ex's myspace account" since "hacker" really means cracker to like
99% of the internet population. Instead of spending 10 min to get an idea what
the latest trends in investment community are, you'll have to spend 20+
minutes while. As for being bored and you're a startup founder, you're in
trouble! And if you're really bored and need to read something, there's plenty
of reddit & digg subdomains that are interesting.

This new site will lose focus and will degrade into another digg or reddit.
Second law of (thermodynamics) Internet almost guarantees it. Paul, if you
want this site to become bigger and grow and become a better reddit and all
that, why not get a new domain and start it there? Why destroy what works?

~~~
simen
I guess the existing user mass is a big reason why changing focus instead of
starting again is preferrable.

Personally, I don't care about startup news, so I didn't bother to register
until now; obviously I think it's a good idea. Perhaps my opinion doesn't
count?

~~~
davidw
Presumably existing users are smart enough to track another site.

It has some downsides too, such as overlapping content, but it might not have
been a bad idea.

~~~
simen
It doesn't take much intelligence to follow two websites, but it does take
some more effort.

Also, it's perhaps that the site now caters more to the target audience than
to the thing that unites them (Y combinator/startups).

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zach
That's ridiculous. It's just making clear what should have been clear from the
start, which is that news.yc is news for Y Combinator _people_ , not just
about their startups.

Hacker News is also much less bland. And for those hackers who don't think
they're interested in startups, it's more tempting! (Muhahaha! Come, hackers,
and catch the chronic startup syndrome!)

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hhm
I don't agree. I think this Hacker News idea is fantastic. Some time ago I
proposed a "classic.reddit.com", the idea being the same: having a place where
we could have the good old reddit, or rather, where we could have intelligent
news back again.

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bmaier
I don't know Paul but having followed here for a while and having read most of
his work I'll offer you two reasons:

1) The site was losing its usefulness for him so he made it more useful for
himself and chances are others will find it useful as well.

2) Because He Can

Perhaps if you don't agree with the changes, then write your own news app and
compete. Its how the world works after all.

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daniel-cussen
I agree with the change. After a while, all the startup articles sound exactly
the same. 10 tips for starting a startup...10 tips for dealing with VCs...what
it takes to succeed...

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webology
Change is good but I think you mainly just stated what the site was becoming
anyways based on the content as of lately. Hopefully, everyone can keep their
politics in their basements and the hacker theme stays. That's why I stopped
reading reddit daily. Now there's a politics sub-reddit but it took less then
a week for it to junk up their homepage again...

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Andys
I think the new algorithm is going to make the site less adaptable to new
concepts and ideas in the future, if a just few of the big users vote them
down. The type of stories voted up high will get stuck at a local maxima in
story space.

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motivi
Bad idea. What distinguished this site was the news on startups. If you want
tech news there are hundreds of good sites out there. This becomes one more.
Look at dzone, slashdot, and many more.

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awt
I like the change.

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DougBTX
What would be really interesting would be some sort of hidden A/B testing...

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gojomo
Another long-term factor to consider: startup enthusiasm ebbs with business
cycles, while hacking endures.

