- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Hacker News, originally Startup News, is ostensibly a forum for intelligent programmers to discuss interesting topics, but is used mostly by idiots who can't program well or at all for discussing corporate press releases. The forum exists to advertise its sponsor, Y Combinator, a startup accelerator named after a construct from the Lambda Calculus; the basic idea behind venture capitalism is to give a lot of money to a lot of businesses which need it, so that one or two can gain a global monopoly and pay more than enough to make up for the otherwise massive losses. This is the land of coding bootcamps, places where greedy idiots pay to learn enough to imitate programmers to the untrained eye; of developer advocates, so-called programmers who can't program but love the associated attention; and of so much more. The best compliment I can give to Hacker News is to note its simple design loads well in just about any WWW browser.
Without going on a tangent, Y Combinator plays a large part in funding the many insane businesses which make no profit but persist for years, such as DoorDash and AirBNB, breaking laws and people all the way. We can also thank Y Combinator for Reddit and Twitch.
It would be remiss to ignore the website dedicated to mocking Hacker News: http://n-gate.com (archive)
In the usual day on Hacker News, interesting technical topics go ignored or with few comments, whereas political screeching and Apple product announcements regularly get hundreds or thousands of comments. Lately, many discussions are about Twitter threads, Reddit threads, or Reddit threads about Twitter threads. If it's not possible to comment without in-depth technical knowledge, it won't get many comments on Hacker News.
The way Hacker News works is to have users upload links or questions, which end up in newest (archive), and those which get enough upvotes, or support from the staff, make it to the front page (archive).
This wouldn't be a suitable thread without some colorful characters, so here are five:
Paul Graham
Paul Graham created Hacker News. He, like most startup founders, made his money by selling his startup to a then-functioning business, Yahoo. I've read his books and essays, Hackers & Painters (archive) is the main book to consider here; there are some good points made in some of them, and I wouldn't call them terrible, but I mostly found him to be pretending to be a hacker, and when he speaks of hackers he prefers the sanitized business founder version of fake hackers over the real group.
Paul Graham (username: pg (archive)) has for years preferred Twitter over his forum, where he posts things such as pseudo-mathematical arguments about why startup founders are more valuable than all of the employees combined:
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832 (archive)
He finds time to post on Hacker News when complaining about Twitter, however:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042993 (archive)
Daniel Gackle and Scott Bell
Insights on the inner-workings of the forum, including the names of both moderators, are provided in this article (archive).
Unusually, the duo don't do it for free; they're the only Y Combinator employees who work on Hacker News, according to the article. Daniel Gackle (username: dang (archive)) is the more active of the two and he runs around chiding users who run afoul of the tone policing or who dislike the Chinese government for comments that could be considered racist, for two examples. I can't find or recall Scott Bell's username; he may lack one.
Until re-reading that article, I nearly forgot to mention that Hacker News is written in Arc (archive), a dialect of Lisp about which no one really cares. Paul Graham has since made an even less interesting dialect named Bel (archive).
Thanks go to @ditto for finding a photograph of Dang here (archive).
View attachment 5248503
Doreen Michele
I'm to understand Doreen Michele (username: DoreenMichele (archive)) is the subject of ridicule for some who also enjoy mocking Hacker News. I see her around not much, but because she's a woman she'll never be banned for any of her behaviour there. From her about section:
Ironically, here's an article titled Privacy and Safety Online (archive). She seems to disregard the very advice she gives. Her first pull request on Github (archive) was correcting a typo in documentation. In this comment (archive), she describes how she believes not in the concept of autoimmune diseases.
Now, as I was reading some of her comments, I saw therein reasonable opinions, so I won't claim to personally dislike her, but she's worth mentioning nonetheless. One seems unlikely to find her comments if one browses primarily technical topics.
Why is this woman using Hacker News? Well, that's why I've italicized it in every instance. I can't help but compare how she's been treated to how they treated Terry Davis, whom I believe to have been largely shadowbanned.
Peter Roberts
Peter Roberts (username: proberts (archive)) is an immigration lawyer who has regularly made new discussions titled I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA since 2015. His specialty is helping startups and other businesses import labor so they don't have to pay natives better rates.
There are other foolish people who use the forum, such as Walter Bright (username: WalterBright (archive)) who is known for his compiler work but constantly injects old-school and nonsensical political opinions into discussions; and Kragen Sitaker (username: kragen (archive)) who writes all years with five digits, such as 2023 becoming 02023, which regularly collects a litany of people complaining about it; but it feels mean-spirited to focus on them beyond a mere mention.
Hacker News has a habit of changing the style of its website to have a black bar when some people die. Startup founders and businessmen get this treatment, but Terry Davis never did.
The Hacker News software is designed to lie to its users, and dang in particular helpfully points out to users that the software may be shadowbanning a topic, by making it appear in newest to the user who submitted it and to no one else until after it has no chance of reaching the front page, but that certainly doesn't mean Hacker News is purposefully targeting a topic. He expects people to believe it to be a happy coincidence.
This was recently most blatant when Cloudflare kicked off Kiwi Farms. The first discussion was on the front page, and just about every following discussion was pre-emptively censored or manually kicked off the front page. Hackers shouldn't concern themselves with trannies trying to destroy the Internet, according to Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673 (archive)
As noted, subsequent discussions of this and similar topics were regularly and dutifully dropped off the front page, when they managed to get there at all, by dang or others. Here's one subsequent discussion, although I'm not perfectly certain if this particular discussion were kicked off the front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33307711 (archive)
It's not particularly meaningful to archive these discussions, because most of them have been hidden to anyone without an account, even at the time. When a message gets a suitable amount of downvotes, it begins to blend in with the background, to make it harder to read, and eventually they become entirely invisible, even in structure, to those without accounts. Negative comments were usually allowed to remain. It's important to know that Hacker News doesn't only make downvoted comments blend into the background, they're also regularly marked [dead] or [flagged] alongside entire reply chains, meaning an account would be required to view them and meaning the Internet Archive probably can't archive them afterwards.
The software also changes the titles of articles, ostensibly to inhibit clickbait or whatever, but it's so poorly done that it regularly butchers normal titles until they mean the opposite of what they meant as originally written. At times, this is manually corrected, and other times is merely mentioned in the comments.
I've been collecting screenshots of dumbfuckery on Hacker News for years, and once I made an account here I had the ideal venue in which to use some of the best from my collection. It makes no sense to upload hundreds, however, so I'll upload just a few instead. Firstly, let's play a game of find out what's wrong here:
While I can source some of these images, there's little point, and not all of them can be sourced as has been noted.
The users of Hacker News tend to have an inflated sense of worth, and to overestimate their importance:
The idea behind a startup is simple: A few people work really hard and make lots of money if the business becomes successful, made even easier with success redefined to acquisition by a real business. The users of Hacker News tend to overvalue what a few people with outside funding can do, however. I've seen users there bemoan potential laws that would negatively impact startups, with other users there needing to remind them that other types of small businesses exist. Now, despite this, they also overvalue the few successful large businesses that come to dominate markets, and to buy many startups:
As expected, the hackers on Hacker News aren't very good at hacking. They'll regularly defend Amazon Web Services (AWS) by claiming it to be nigh-impossible to reach a similar level of reliability, even when AWS goes down for hours at a time. I liken them to saying so: Why wipe our asses when Amazon can do it for us cheaper? Good examples arise every time some noticeable failure strikes:
Other examples of dumbassery are criticizing the idea that people should be able to buy software instead of rent it, criticizing the idea of not selling broken software since that would be too hard, excusing whatever large corporations do, and excusing their obvious mediocrity compared to real hackers by reciting slogans about Imposter Syndrome. If the marketers and midwits weren't enough, Hacker News is also plagued by Indians; for years, conversations about, say, governmental policies tend to have posters mention the Indian versions of such; criticism of China is also attacked by posters obviously working for the fifty cent army; and any criticism of certain Jewish religious practices is similarly attacked by the JIDF every time I've ever seen the topic arise.
It's certainly appropriate to include what other hackers think about the forum, such as in this OpenBSD song (archive):
Built up.. a sense of dread..
IMPLEMENT_ASN1 macros in my head.
Found a way down through 10 levels of hell
And looking there, I noticed more to fix.
#unifdef, and rewrite that
cut this out, and hear it splat.
Found my way upstairs and read hackernews
whining about comic sans and CVS.
Whiiiiiiinne whine whine....
Whiiiine whinee.... Whine Whineee....
whine.. They... Use Cee.. Vee Esss...
Jamie Zawinski gets criticism from users there for redirecting any request to his website (archive) with a referrer from Hacker News to this image (archive):
Barely worthy of mention is Hacker News' retarded little brother, Lobsters (archive), due to low activity that usually copies Hacker News anyway. The forum was originally created because Hacker News has vague and deceptive moderation. Amusingly, Lobsters not long back even managed to drive off BurntSushi (archive), a man whose claim to fame is reimplementing grep in Rust as ripgrep (archive):
https://lobste.rs/s/zp4ofg/lobster_burntsushi_has_left_site (archive)
I mention this mostly to show how they've managed to drive away even those whom they admire. It's a community dying slowly.
Another interesting user is andyc (archive), who gained attention from me by making damn near every post he writes there about his pet project, Oil Shell (archive), including one of his posts in the discussion about BurntSushi leaving (archive). There's also the obligatory tranny Google employee who was once staff, Irene (archive), but more research is necessary to determine if he'd be an interesting subject.
I'm placing this last to give it more attention, as it's a personal favourite of mine:
Without going on a tangent, Y Combinator plays a large part in funding the many insane businesses which make no profit but persist for years, such as DoorDash and AirBNB, breaking laws and people all the way. We can also thank Y Combinator for Reddit and Twitch.
It would be remiss to ignore the website dedicated to mocking Hacker News: http://n-gate.com (archive)
In the usual day on Hacker News, interesting technical topics go ignored or with few comments, whereas political screeching and Apple product announcements regularly get hundreds or thousands of comments. Lately, many discussions are about Twitter threads, Reddit threads, or Reddit threads about Twitter threads. If it's not possible to comment without in-depth technical knowledge, it won't get many comments on Hacker News.
The way Hacker News works is to have users upload links or questions, which end up in newest (archive), and those which get enough upvotes, or support from the staff, make it to the front page (archive).
This wouldn't be a suitable thread without some colorful characters, so here are five:
Paul Graham
Paul Graham created Hacker News. He, like most startup founders, made his money by selling his startup to a then-functioning business, Yahoo. I've read his books and essays, Hackers & Painters (archive) is the main book to consider here; there are some good points made in some of them, and I wouldn't call them terrible, but I mostly found him to be pretending to be a hacker, and when he speaks of hackers he prefers the sanitized business founder version of fake hackers over the real group.
Paul Graham (username: pg (archive)) has for years preferred Twitter over his forum, where he posts things such as pseudo-mathematical arguments about why startup founders are more valuable than all of the employees combined:
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832 (archive)
He finds time to post on Hacker News when complaining about Twitter, however:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042993 (archive)
Daniel Gackle and Scott Bell
Insights on the inner-workings of the forum, including the names of both moderators, are provided in this article (archive).
Unusually, the duo don't do it for free; they're the only Y Combinator employees who work on Hacker News, according to the article. Daniel Gackle (username: dang (archive)) is the more active of the two and he runs around chiding users who run afoul of the tone policing or who dislike the Chinese government for comments that could be considered racist, for two examples. I can't find or recall Scott Bell's username; he may lack one.
Until re-reading that article, I nearly forgot to mention that Hacker News is written in Arc (archive), a dialect of Lisp about which no one really cares. Paul Graham has since made an even less interesting dialect named Bel (archive).
Thanks go to @ditto for finding a photograph of Dang here (archive).
View attachment 5248503
Doreen Michele
I'm to understand Doreen Michele (username: DoreenMichele (archive)) is the subject of ridicule for some who also enjoy mocking Hacker News. I see her around not much, but because she's a woman she'll never be banned for any of her behaviour there. From her about section:
After a small stint of skulking around, I found her website (archive). I'm not going to put her photograph in the opening post, because I don't want to look at her face every time I admire my work. Fortunately, she's done most of my work for me in the article titled Comments to date by me with more than 100 karma on HN (archive). Therein, she claims to be riddled with mysterious diseases, she claims to have been raped, she claims to have been sexually abused as a child, she claims to have two sons, and she admits to bouts of homelessness lasting for years.
Ironically, here's an article titled Privacy and Safety Online (archive). She seems to disregard the very advice she gives. Her first pull request on Github (archive) was correcting a typo in documentation. In this comment (archive), she describes how she believes not in the concept of autoimmune diseases.
Now, as I was reading some of her comments, I saw therein reasonable opinions, so I won't claim to personally dislike her, but she's worth mentioning nonetheless. One seems unlikely to find her comments if one browses primarily technical topics.
Why is this woman using Hacker News? Well, that's why I've italicized it in every instance. I can't help but compare how she's been treated to how they treated Terry Davis, whom I believe to have been largely shadowbanned.
Peter Roberts
Peter Roberts (username: proberts (archive)) is an immigration lawyer who has regularly made new discussions titled I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA since 2015. His specialty is helping startups and other businesses import labor so they don't have to pay natives better rates.
There are other foolish people who use the forum, such as Walter Bright (username: WalterBright (archive)) who is known for his compiler work but constantly injects old-school and nonsensical political opinions into discussions; and Kragen Sitaker (username: kragen (archive)) who writes all years with five digits, such as 2023 becoming 02023, which regularly collects a litany of people complaining about it; but it feels mean-spirited to focus on them beyond a mere mention.
Hacker News has a habit of changing the style of its website to have a black bar when some people die. Startup founders and businessmen get this treatment, but Terry Davis never did.
The Hacker News software is designed to lie to its users, and dang in particular helpfully points out to users that the software may be shadowbanning a topic, by making it appear in newest to the user who submitted it and to no one else until after it has no chance of reaching the front page, but that certainly doesn't mean Hacker News is purposefully targeting a topic. He expects people to believe it to be a happy coincidence.
This was recently most blatant when Cloudflare kicked off Kiwi Farms. The first discussion was on the front page, and just about every following discussion was pre-emptively censored or manually kicked off the front page. Hackers shouldn't concern themselves with trannies trying to destroy the Internet, according to Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673 (archive)
As noted, subsequent discussions of this and similar topics were regularly and dutifully dropped off the front page, when they managed to get there at all, by dang or others. Here's one subsequent discussion, although I'm not perfectly certain if this particular discussion were kicked off the front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33307711 (archive)
It's not particularly meaningful to archive these discussions, because most of them have been hidden to anyone without an account, even at the time. When a message gets a suitable amount of downvotes, it begins to blend in with the background, to make it harder to read, and eventually they become entirely invisible, even in structure, to those without accounts. Negative comments were usually allowed to remain. It's important to know that Hacker News doesn't only make downvoted comments blend into the background, they're also regularly marked [dead] or [flagged] alongside entire reply chains, meaning an account would be required to view them and meaning the Internet Archive probably can't archive them afterwards.
The software also changes the titles of articles, ostensibly to inhibit clickbait or whatever, but it's so poorly done that it regularly butchers normal titles until they mean the opposite of what they meant as originally written. At times, this is manually corrected, and other times is merely mentioned in the comments.
I've been collecting screenshots of dumbfuckery on Hacker News for years, and once I made an account here I had the ideal venue in which to use some of the best from my collection. It makes no sense to upload hundreds, however, so I'll upload just a few instead. Firstly, let's play a game of find out what's wrong here:
The users of Hacker News tend to have an inflated sense of worth, and to overestimate their importance:
The idea behind a startup is simple: A few people work really hard and make lots of money if the business becomes successful, made even easier with success redefined to acquisition by a real business. The users of Hacker News tend to overvalue what a few people with outside funding can do, however. I've seen users there bemoan potential laws that would negatively impact startups, with other users there needing to remind them that other types of small businesses exist. Now, despite this, they also overvalue the few successful large businesses that come to dominate markets, and to buy many startups:
As expected, the hackers on Hacker News aren't very good at hacking. They'll regularly defend Amazon Web Services (AWS) by claiming it to be nigh-impossible to reach a similar level of reliability, even when AWS goes down for hours at a time. I liken them to saying so: Why wipe our asses when Amazon can do it for us cheaper? Good examples arise every time some noticeable failure strikes:
Other examples of dumbassery are criticizing the idea that people should be able to buy software instead of rent it, criticizing the idea of not selling broken software since that would be too hard, excusing whatever large corporations do, and excusing their obvious mediocrity compared to real hackers by reciting slogans about Imposter Syndrome. If the marketers and midwits weren't enough, Hacker News is also plagued by Indians; for years, conversations about, say, governmental policies tend to have posters mention the Indian versions of such; criticism of China is also attacked by posters obviously working for the fifty cent army; and any criticism of certain Jewish religious practices is similarly attacked by the JIDF every time I've ever seen the topic arise.
It's certainly appropriate to include what other hackers think about the forum, such as in this OpenBSD song (archive):
Built up.. a sense of dread..
IMPLEMENT_ASN1 macros in my head.
Found a way down through 10 levels of hell
And looking there, I noticed more to fix.
#unifdef, and rewrite that
cut this out, and hear it splat.
Found my way upstairs and read hackernews
whining about comic sans and CVS.
Whiiiiiiinne whine whine....
Whiiiine whinee.... Whine Whineee....
whine.. They... Use Cee.. Vee Esss...
Jamie Zawinski gets criticism from users there for redirecting any request to his website (archive) with a referrer from Hacker News to this image (archive):
Barely worthy of mention is Hacker News' retarded little brother, Lobsters (archive), due to low activity that usually copies Hacker News anyway. The forum was originally created because Hacker News has vague and deceptive moderation. Amusingly, Lobsters not long back even managed to drive off BurntSushi (archive), a man whose claim to fame is reimplementing grep in Rust as ripgrep (archive):
https://lobste.rs/s/zp4ofg/lobster_burntsushi_has_left_site (archive)
I mention this mostly to show how they've managed to drive away even those whom they admire. It's a community dying slowly.
Another interesting user is andyc (archive), who gained attention from me by making damn near every post he writes there about his pet project, Oil Shell (archive), including one of his posts in the discussion about BurntSushi leaving (archive). There's also the obligatory tranny Google employee who was once staff, Irene (archive), but more research is necessary to determine if he'd be an interesting subject.
I'm placing this last to give it more attention, as it's a personal favourite of mine:
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