[HN Gopher] The Evolution of Hacker News (2013)
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The Evolution of Hacker News (2013)
Author : nguyentranvu
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-02-08 07:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| nexthash wrote:
| I've been on HN as a lurker since 2014, and am still surprised by
| how few people in hacker communities I am a part of are aware of
| the its existence. I think part of what makes the site great is
| the small size and structured nature of it, allowing regulars to
| promote its values and prevent the discussion from diluting with
| bad comments. There's even a 'classic' version of Hacker News
| where the front-page consists solely of posts upvoted by accounts
| created before February 2008:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Been a user for 8 years on this username; +1 on the old username
| I lost the password to. Pretty incredible that it's still
| something I check every day, more than even reddit. A credit to
| @dang and of course @pg it remains as relevant and educational as
| ever.
| vonnik wrote:
| It would be interesting to see an update on this article,
| especially how the conversation has evolved, and its quality
| preserved, with moderation from @dang and others since 2014.
|
| https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
| reaperducer wrote:
| I'm a youngster compared with most people's tenure on HN, but
| I've noticed a change in the place since the planet went into
| lockdown.
|
| I'm not going to get into the changes I observe because I don't
| want to start a long, off-topic thread. But I think if you pay
| close enough attention, you can see changes in HN over short
| periods of time.
|
| Even between weekdays and weekends, HN changes.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Also a fairly new account, but I would say that the changes
| on the site seem to be mostly based on topics rather than
| community. The pandemic has changed the makeup of the front
| page and thus the average conversation of the site as a
| whole.
| type0 wrote:
| > Even between weekdays and weekends, HN changes.
|
| There's American and European wave during the 24 hour span,
| maybe even Asian/Aussie wave, but that's still not as
| noticeable.
| grinich wrote:
| Here's what the HN homepage looked like on the day it launched
| (Ocb 9, 2006)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
|
| (Funny timing, I just discovered this feature yesterday.)
| akkartik wrote:
| I believe that link just renders old data with the current
| style. We should go look in archive.org or something. I suspect
| your point still stands, though.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, there are no comment scores for one thing.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| So, was that pg and his [fake] alt accounts?
| zappo2938 wrote:
| For comparison, the original Reddit homepage.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
| 2112 wrote:
| Yes. That was your submission from yesterday and that's how I
| found out about it ! See my other comment ^ in which I reposted
| about it. Thanks for that. Did you know about this ;
|
| https://hnrss.github.io/ ?
|
| That's pretty cool too and I just found out about it this week
| ( this account is young but my soul is old ... )
| mojuba wrote:
| I love going back and reading predictions. _Wired: The Desktop
| is Dead_ (2006) caught my eye: operating systems and processors
| will become irrelevant, it 's all about network services and
| network storage now (according to Eric Schmidt anyway).
|
| The lesson from this type of articles is usually that you can
| make linear extrapolations and look cool as an author, but not
| everything is linearly extrapolatable in a positive way. Trends
| continue linearly for a while, but so do problems that
| eventually require a major shake up. It's seeing the growing
| problems that's difficult.
|
| Who would have thought before 2006 that the world doesn't need
| any more powerful and bulkier computers in their homes but
| instead, we'd need lightweight pocket computers that would put
| new requirements on energy efficiency of software for example?
| That operating systems won't go away but instead will take a
| whole new direction towards managed environments and more
| performant programming languages. Etc. etc.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've been reading some old (olde?) tech references,
| forecasts, and futurist works of late, and am noting a few
| trends.
|
| Among them are Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_ , which turned
| 50 last year, read for the first time, Lawrence Lessig's
| _Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace_ (22 years), a re-read,
| and Andrew Shapiro 's _The Control Revolution_ , also for the
| first time.
|
| All have hits and misses. Some of them are more slanted one
| way than the other.
|
| Toffler has aged surprisingly well, in my view, despite some
| weaknesses. Lessig, at least in his introduction and first
| chapter, similarly. Shapiro is rapidly shaping up to be an
| excellent Really Bad Example. (Lessig references Shapiro
| early in _Code_ , hence my looking into it.)
|
| I've been toying with a notion of an ontology of
| technological mechanisms, which looks not at _fields_ of
| technology, but rather _how they achieve their effects_. I
| 've come up with nine basic categories: materials, fuels,
| process knowledge (what's generally meant by "technology"),
| causal knowlege (roughly, "science"), power transmission and
| transformation (ask if you're curious), networks, systems,
| information (accessing, storage/retrieval, processing,
| disseminating), and a final category I've tended to call
| hygiene functions -- dealing with unwanted or unintended
| consequences.
|
| It's that last aspect which seems to dominate considerations
| ultimately, because all technologies can be thought of as
| _interventions_ in some _system_ to an _intended effect_ ,
| but having several dimensions, including:
|
| - Benefit / harm
|
| - Near term / long term
|
| - Clearly evident / non-evident
|
| Generally, we tend to choose technologies with clearly
| evident near-term benefit, and strictly avoid those with
| clearly evident near-term harm. In cases where a mixed set of
| benefits and harms of varying evidence or perceptibility, and
| of differing timeframes is present ... things get more
| complicated.
|
| And as interventions in systems become more complex, the odds
| of a _negative_ interaction tend to increase.
|
| The upshot is that _cautions_ are often more significant than
| _ethusiasms_ , and in the case most especially of Toffler,
| the concerns he raises, most especially of psychological and
| sociological impacts of increasing information flows and
| rates of change, do seem to have been reasonably prophetic.
| Sections dealing with specific technologies and their
| presumed social benefits are the weakest. In some cases the
| promised benefits have come to pass, occasionally to such a
| degree that it's hard to even see them from the present
| vantage point --- they've very much _become part of our
| world_ in a way that is like water to a fish: so ubiquitous
| it 's easy to forget it exists at all. In particular, the
| developers or advocates of a specific technique (or
| occasionally, scientific advance) seem to be _exceedingly_
| poor at conceiving of, or at least sharing any conceptions
| of, downsides. There 's an extraordinarily strong positivity
| bias. Not universally, but as a general rule.
|
| Lessig is similarly concerned with harms, and (at least in
| its introduction) seems to focus accurately on the right
| problem areas and dynamics.
|
| Shapiro has read to me through the first part of his book as,
| charitably, remarkably oracular in the sense of "this is a
| prophecy which might be read two ways", as in "if King
| Croesus crosses the Halys River, a great empire will be
| destroyed." (Spoiler: one was. It wasn't the one Croesus had
| in mind.) For the most part, Shapiro reads to me as
| childishly naive, credulous, fatuistic, uninsightful,
| concerned with the trivial, self-parodying, and often
| foreshadowing but apparently with absolutely no self-
| awareness in doing so. It _is_ remarkable how many of the
| specific actors and situations what are front-of-mind today
| are mentioned or alluded to in the text. But the references
| don 't seem aware of their own significance.
|
| In his defence, Shapiro _occasionally_ evidences some degree
| of awareness or perception, though these feel like brief
| moments of lucidity in a once sound mind. And it 's possible
| that the latter parts of the book refute the naivete of the
| first chapters, though I'm skeptical (and reviews I've read
| suggest otherwise). It's very much a case of The Author To
| Whom I Must Constantly Scream as I read the text though.
|
| But yeah: be _very_ skeptical of self-involved proponents of
| technological or other initiatives. Whatever expertise they
| may have is strongly moderated by deliberate or unconscious
| self-serving bias.
| mojuba wrote:
| Interesting thoughts, thanks.
|
| > - Benefit / harm > - Near term / long term > - Clearly
| evident / non-evident
|
| I still think that in addition to these things it's the
| growth function, the linear segments of it, then sudden
| non-linearity that we fundamentally always get wrong in our
| predictions.
|
| Think of the 1960-1970s that was considered the era of
| space exploration or the beginning of it, and how people
| wrongly extrapolated it up to the year 2000 (A Space
| Odyssey, yep).
|
| Or when we try to predict non-linearities, we get it wrong
| too. Taleb predicted the end of Google in 2007, also made
| fun of e-scooters back then. But if I'm not mistaken he
| also praised segways. Well, everybody did.
|
| In other words, we are wrong most of the time and we are
| wrong about the non-linearities in the growth functions. So
| much so that you could probably even say: if a prediction
| is a linear extrapolation then it's definitely wrong. If
| it's a prediction of a breakage then the chances of it
| being correct are purely random.
|
| Look at all the predictions of the next market crash made
| in the past 10 years. It's as if the market is listening
| and doing the opposite!
| marcodiego wrote:
| Didn't know such feature.
|
| Interesting day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-10-09 Microsoft
| gives up on Windows 10 Mobile the same day Librem 5 was funded.
| 2112 wrote:
| How about this on day 2 ;
|
| Google Acquires YouTube For $1.6B
|
| with : 12 points - 0 comments ...
|
| Think about that when in the early days of a new project.
| mojuba wrote:
| I can't believe I've been a HN user for 14 years. Things come and
| go but HN was one of the very very few web sites that I visited
| pretty much every day for this whole time. Except for rare hiking
| trip days.
|
| It's also amazing how the spirit and the quality stay more or
| less the same here. I guess not all Eternal September effects are
| alike.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| pg left
| blhack wrote:
| Completely agree. I think this is the website I have been a
| consistent user of the longest (aside from facebook).
|
| Love it here. It does seem like the discussion here has become
| quite a bit less technical, but I think that is really just due
| to a de-emphasis on the important of low-level tech
| understanding in the startup space.
| type0 wrote:
| It is less and less technical for every year. Probably
| because it's not just developers among the users now, you can
| encounter chemists, engineers, lawyers etc. It's usually some
| of those curious professions that acquire interest for
| programming and like to follow tech news.
| esja wrote:
| Same, most days for almost 13 years, and mostly lurking.
|
| I think "the medium is the message" applies here. The
| minimalist design is a huge part of HN's success. That and the
| excellent moderation.
| astrojams wrote:
| 10 years for me. I still check it every day.
| 2112 wrote:
| This was posted yesterday ;
|
| HN homepage on the day it launched (Oct 9, 2006)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-9
|
| I've been a power lurker for years and had a few accounts. I
| can't imagine my life without HN. I'm here almost everyday, at
| least once a day. What I'm getting at is this ; picture coming
| here and finding literally 0 submissions [0] ... This was a
| somewhat surreal and shocking experience, like seeing the
| completely deserted downtown at the beginning of the pandemic.
| If the site just went away it wouldn't be as bad as this.
| Picture showing up to the bar, work, or whatever and no one
| else is there. Like they're all dead or something. I don't
| usually feel lonely, but I would on that day. I could quite
| possibly cry or have a panic attack or something.
|
| I came to realize HN is my third place [1] and it has become
| possibly even more important to me during this goddamn
| pandemic. Thank you all for coming here. I love you guys.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-11-10
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
| mountaineer wrote:
| I'm in the same boat and have you beat by a week. Time flies.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| Same here, although you and the commenter have me beat by a
| couple of months.
|
| Unlike some, I have never sworn off HN and left in a huff.
|
| HN is where I learned about the drawbacks of where internet
| tech was going. Many of us started with a desire to build
| sticky sites and apps, but as some startups mastered this, it
| became obvious that this was two-edged sword.
|
| I miss PG being on, but I completely understand why he left. It
| got to the point where he couldn't say something as simple as
| "The sky is blue" without a dozen negative and nitpicking
| replies. No fun.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I miss PG being on, but I completely understand why he
| left._
|
| pg isn't shy of (seemingly) speaking his mind on twitter
| though.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I am happy for that.
|
| pg is one of an extremely small number of high-follower
| folks I follow on Twitter. It's mostly because I miss his
| input here.
|
| I love watching smart people discuss stuff (not pointlessly
| argue) so when I started here, I would post any kind of
| question that I thought would be interesting to see like-
| minded (tech) folks discuss. Things like "Is there a God?"
| I'd also engage with folks who had differing views in order
| to try to learn from them.
|
| I remember one time I asked some kind of question that set
| folks off. PG came on and said something like "Why don't
| you guys find out more about why he's asking that question
| instead of trashing him so much?" (My paraphrasing and poor
| memory)
|
| I think he was still asking that question when he finally
| left. I don't think he ever got a good answer.
|
| pg and I probably disagree on a ton of things, but he seems
| interested in sharing and learning, not playing the
| emotional manipulation game. That's why I follow him there.
| vimy wrote:
| I've been here since 2012. I feel there has been a shift from
| startup and programming discussions to more general interests.
| Definitely a lot more political debates here. Now Indiehackers
| forum feels more like the old HN.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I disagree. Semi-early HN (I've only been here since 2010)
| was a _lot_ more political and a _lot_ more technical. When
| the current heavy moderation regime was added, political
| topics were intentionally (and for a period openly and
| explicitly) pushed out. It was after a period with a lot of
| threads about black people 's experiences in tech.
|
| I thought the moderation would chase me away, especially with
| the reduction in technical content (after a long period of X
| in javascript threads overwhelming the site.) I was wrong,
| it's still nice, it's just more mainstream. It's the same
| stories that are trending on google news, just debated and
| discussed by smart people with grammar and civility fetishes.
| That's not actually bad.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| Could it be due to an influx of Reddit refugees that have
| left the platform due to its serious decline of quality in
| the past couple of years?
| totalZero wrote:
| I'm not the newest user here, but this is what I think on
| that specific subject....
|
| Every time I think about comparing HN to Reddit, I am
| jarred back to reality by comments that start with "I work
| in [extremely specific field relevant to article]" or "I
| did [X project] with [Y person at center of discussion]."
| People show a different face depending on the group
| culture, and HN just draws a different humor out of people
| than Reddit does. The same person could be very serious on
| HN, and then turn around and write looney jokes on Reddit.
|
| There are certain areas of Reddit that are informative and
| moderated to maintain a high degree of quality. I think
| they often deal with a shared hobby, profession, or
| pursuit.
| jshevek wrote:
| Yes, this definitely contributes. You see these changes in
| the language used and in the voting habits as well.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| I lurked for a long time, but I find myself here more as Reddit
| has become less useful over the last decade.
| sungam wrote:
| 13 years for me!
| b5 wrote:
| Interesting to see how stable the design of Hacker News has been.
| Here's the earliest I c Ould find in the Wayback Machine - from
| 21st February, 2007:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...
|
| Some changes - most notably the name - but you could easily
| mistake it for the current design at a glance.
| k__ wrote:
| Which is interesting, considering it's so bad on mobile.
| krapp wrote:
| I can remember when mobile stylesheets were being discussed,
| some people were claiming that as a feature instead of a bug,
| because the sort of users who use mobile phones would
| probably be the sort of users Hacker News wants to scare
| away.
| prepend wrote:
| I use it 95% on mobile and rarely curse the UI.
|
| I like that it renders quickly, shows lots of articles, and
| shows lots of comments.
|
| It takes concentration to vote and hide links, but I think
| it's optimized for reading and commenting. Better than any
| other forum, I think.
| k__ wrote:
| The performance is awesome, but the UX is rather bad.
|
| Everything is tiny.
| infogulch wrote:
| Everything is tiny, but it doesn't pointlessly restrict
| pinch to zoom. Thus interacting is more of a 2-finger
| process, but so what? It's refreshing for a site to
| optimize for reading instead of chasing maximum
| engagement.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I really do think the mobile site is fine. Voting buttons are
| a tad small.
| k__ wrote:
| all buttons and links are very small.
| type0 wrote:
| I remember many years ago I discovered this site and my first
| thought was that quality of discussions was good and that
| couldn't possibly last. Usually web forums have a particular
| birth, flourishing and demise periods. HN seems to be an outlier,
| maybe because it isn't a typical forum discussion platform, I'm
| still nostalgic for all the lost web forums of the past.
| f430 wrote:
| downvote abuse has gotten particularly bad and I don't think
| there's any algorithm to stop downvote spam. It is a long
| standing issue on HN
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612885
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23997697
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I'm not convinced there's an actual problem with downvotes on
| HN. It mostly seems that way when you take a snapshot of a
| page, but waiting an hour (if the comment section is active and
| the topic is not controversial), grey comments have a tendency
| to become un-grey over time unless they fall into a few
| categories. Maybe someone doing NLP research and sentiment
| analysis could put together a more thorough analysis, but from
| what I've seen:
|
| Comments that tend to become and remain grey:
|
| - Complaints about downvoting (generic complaints like yours,
| or specific complaints about an instance of downvoting)
|
| - Complaints about paywalls
|
| - Complaints about the article based only on the first couple
| of paragraphs
|
| - Complaints about article titles
|
| - Other, generally off-topic, ranting comments
|
| (NB: Many of the above fall under the broader category of
| "boring and off-topic")
|
| Comments that tend to become and remain dead:
|
| - Bigoted comments (rare here, but happen, see a discussion
| earlier where someone suggested non-white people should be
| gassed)
|
| - Highly political comments
|
| - Comments consisting mostly of personal insults directed at
| the previous commenter or article author
|
| Discussion topics where, to the extent that it does occur,
| "downvote abuse" is most apparent:
|
| - Anything political
|
| - Anything dealing with race/ethnicity/national heritage
|
| - Many dealing with US immigration policies (which hits both of
| the above)
|
| - Many on economics, especially where there's no "one true
| answer" and opinion rules the day (same issue political
| discussions often have)
| [deleted]
| jfg wrote:
| Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730229
| brk wrote:
| I've been here since the beginning, though lurked for a while
| before actually creating an account. I was also at the original
| Startup School session or whatever it was called on a Saturday, I
| think shortly before this site launched?
| type0 wrote:
| I have been lurking much longer than I have been commenting,
| somehow it feels that it always will be the case.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Does PG still spend much time working on HN? Worrying about HN?
| tptacek wrote:
| No, and hopefully no. Dan Gackle ('dang) runs the place now,
| unixhero wrote:
| God I love this site.
| tkinom wrote:
| Love to know more about the HW and SW stacks that service HN.
| mandis wrote:
| there was a quote that said the site runs off of 1 core, which
| is a feat in scaling....
|
| need moarr details!
| saagarjha wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767439
| nanomonkey wrote:
| From my understanding, it's written in Arc, a Lisp variant
| created by PG. The Wikipedia article on arc [0] lists some
| tutorials for creating a forum similar to HN.
|
| [0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)]
| krapp wrote:
| The current version of Arc can be found at arclanguage.org,
| forum included, but HN itself runs a lot of proprietary code
| so the base version of the language and forum won't have
| feature parity with HN.
|
| There is also Anarki[0], which is the public fork of Arc and
| the forum, which is very much not in feature parity with HN.
| Anyone who wants to contribute is welcome to.
|
| [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
| mraza007 wrote:
| I'm glad to be part of the HackerNews Community. I have gained
| immense amount of knowledge from this community.
|
| I wish i had joined this community earlier
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(page generated 2021-02-09 23:01 UTC)