Hacker News Reader

Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

This site has always been populated with hackers and continues to be populated with hackers. Where are all these random business people you speak of coming from? Y Combinator is intended as a program for hackers and this site was made for YC to get a better sense of people applying to the program. If that happens to include some gasp business people, so be it.

There's always software discussion taking place here and if you don't think there's enough, then start a new thread discussing what you think is appropriate. You still have the power to make the site better by contributing worthwhile content. Relevant humor isn't banned here by any means... though I admit that the idea of a Paul Graham Facts meme is much funnier than the facts themselves.

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The rate of ship jumping is accelerating. First, diggers jump to reddit. Then redditers jump to proggit. Proggits jump to hacker news. Where next? Soon it'll be a new social network site for every new thread. Then we'll need a meta social network site, and so on.

I do think a meta social news site is a good idea. It would just be a recommendation engine that fed you links you like from across digg, reddit, news.yc and beyond.

I bet the reddit engine could be adapted to do this. If the rating system could also rate items for you based on the interests of those who rated the page, where the rating value would be a function of the similarity of interests to yours, then it would no longer be eternal September. The only thing missing would be a meta commenting system, similarly constructed.

That the system would be based on existing networks would ensure the cross pollination of ideas between different interest groups.

Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff (Also, hackers don't go around asking people to paint paintings for them for negative compensation).

Look at the front page: the top link is this crap, and then of the top 10, we have 5 completely content-free links, and then another 5 links that are vaguely informative, but none of the kind of insightful fascinating long articles that make one's day (e.g. the violin string thing).

>Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff

That's a ridiculous assertion. You mean that you don't go for this stuff.

If you don't like the links that are on the page, spend some time finding a better link. It doesn't do any good to complain about something you have control over.

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