I think what most impresses me about this meta-blog, besides it being funny, is that whoever is writing it has kept it up for five months so far (23 weekly “issues”), and is not skimping on actually reading the comments (at least for a few I spot-checked, the pithy summaries really do summarize the comments). I could see myself finding it funny to start a blog like this, but I doubt I’d have the dedication to hate-read / hate-summarize HN as an ongoing, months-long project. Maybe the author can’t help reading HN regularly, and writing this is their therapy.
I don’t think hate is a requirement here. There’s lots of worthwhile stuff to read on HN, but at the same time it can be quite a bizarre and hilarious spectacle to behold. These summaries are just a humorously cynical take on it.
There used to be this (serious) monthly pdf of the top hackernews articles, with the articles expanded with a bit more details. You had to pay for it (not much), but is was a nice way to read interesting articles without all the fluff. Hacker monthly it was called, I believe. Too bad they stopped, anyone know of something similar?
Went into it expecting just a lot of anger. There is that, but what’s brilliant is that this post is still funny even if you’re one of those people being made fun of.
JWZ is ahead of the curve in recognizing Y Combinator (“Brownshirt Combinator”, to use his terminology) as part of a new fascist movement. I don’t think that Y Combinator intended to be fascist from the outset, but it’s headed that way. Its main goal is to concentrate cultural power and social capital, and originally that was for an obvious profit motive, of bringing Paul Graham from third-tier wealthy (by Silicon Valley standards) into the “three comma club”. Now, it’s about something more. I don’t think that Graham himself is a fascist, but he’s also basically retired. The new people are after power. JWZ was one of the first people to spot Y Combinator for what it really was.
For example, it’s obvious now that their reason for buying Quora had nothing to do with investment but was purely about editorial control. The good news is that they seem also to have driven Quora into irrelevance.
What I’ve been enjoying in 2017 is having been proven right, with them in the wrong. I got banned from Y Combinator (and later endured a six-month effort by these people to ruin my life) for (a) exposing Kalanick’s misogyny, back when he was a Valley darling, (b) pointing out that Marissa Mayer was dishonestly representing layoffs as firings for trumped-up performace reasons in order to evade the WARN Act, and (c ) linking to Giles Bowkett’s dramatic reading of a Paul Graham essay. I’ve been proven right about pretty much everything. Uber’s sexual harassment culture, as in (a), has been exposed earlier this month; and Yahoo! has been sued for (b), which I knew they were doing just as I know that Mayer learned that trick at Google. Over time, people will realize the truth of this industry and that I was prescient by at least five years.
Over time, people will realize the truth of this industry and that I was prescient by at least five years.
I basically agree with the content of what you’re saying, but I think it would be better received without the repetitive “hey guess what I was right the whole time” tone.
Fair point. I understand that “I told you so” wears thin.
The thing is: I’ve fought fascists and I’ve suffered. I’ve lost job opportunities because I had the gall to stand up for human decency and for progress, fighting to keep light alive while darkness closes in. There was a lot of sacrifice in this, but I hope that history’s judgment will be that I helped humanity to win the fight.
So I’m glad to see some recognition for my side of this. It’s a start and it’s long overdue.
The roasts of FP are always lazy as hell (pun intended, I guess). FPers aren’t insecure about monadic I/O, so you can tell the audience of the joke is smug greybeard types who think maintaining a collection of screensavers means you are sufficiently engaged in the industry to accurately critique its trends. Better targets include the ridiculous types or how you can’t write tail recursive functions without worrying about the stack overflowing thanks to laziness.
I read the whole thing in the tone of a greybeard curmudgeon, although I think it has just enough lightheartedness along with smugness to be funny.
The same guy has yearly reviews of FOSDEM that are also pretty funny, but perhaps more overtly curmudgeonly, and give some clues about his technical preferences.
Lots of good ones there. I love it when titles set themselves up for destruction:
“Leihs, the leading free equipment booking system
It took us eight years to get it right. What we learned about being a FOSS project.
not a mis-paste. it took them EIGHT YEARS to learn how to keep track of their shit. ”
Better targets include the ridiculous types or how you can’t write tail recursive functions without worrying about the stack overflowing thanks to laziness.
I’m going to defend Haskell on this. Yes, laziness is not very intuitive, and the types can be complex. However, laziness is relatively easy to work with. It’s not correct to say that Haskell is always lazy. The difference is that it’s an opt-out model for laziness as opposed to opt-in: you can have strictness, but you have to ask for it explicitly.
On the types, I’ve realized that there are 3-month tools and 20-year tools in software. Some are optimized for short-term productivity and others are optimized to make you productive over a long career with a number of complex, difficult projects.
Haskell is a 20-year language in a world where most people want simpler, 3-month languages. If you take time to really learn it, it’s extremely powerful. However, you can’t spin up a Haskell team to meet “Q3 OKRs” or whatever the idiots are calling that stuff these days. As an individual, you have to invest time to learn the language, and as a company you have to invest in your people to get anything out of it.
Unfortunately, I think the reality of this industry is that the 3-month languages are going to win. If you’re a software engineer, you’re going to be changing jobs every 1-2 years and will often not be in charge of the tool stack.
While I think there’s plenty wrong with HN (which is why I usually come here), I think most of these are pointlessly negative or outright wrong. This reads like someone who feels left out and is trying to convince themselves that they didn’t want to be included in the first place, which is a weird attitude to have about HN.
I don’t think that anyone’s bitter about HN, because it’s easy enough to create an account.
I think that a lot of people get upset when they realize that they made career mistakes because they were sold a bill of goods by people like Paul Graham.
The truth is that you don’t get years back, and that the VC-funded world ruins the careers of most people who enter it. At 35, the bankers and lawyers and academics are established professionals with solid reputations and connections, whereas people who’ve been kicking around in VC-funded startups are too old to be taken seriously in their own world and, not only do they almost never have the financial independence that they were promised, but the world starts laughing at them because they’ve worked in kiddie jobs (Agile Scrum and open-plan offices) for too long on a promise that never game through.
The story we’re told is that if you join a startup and it fails, you’ll just hop into an SVP-level position at Google or Facebook. That might happen for the extremely well-connected, but most of us just get fired when we join startups that fail. It’s all a fucking lie, and when people realize this, they get bitter and either (a) have boiling hatred issues or (b) have an altruistic desire to prevent the next generation from making mistakes. I would like to say that I’m pure (b), but I think that all of us lied-to ex-techies are some mix of the two.
Personally, I’m less bitter as I get older but that’s because I realize that I’m not entirely innocent. I worked for tech companies for a long time, which means that I accepted payment from organizations that were hurting people, and in an industry largely dedicated to making the world worse. I’m miserable, but I deserve some share of that. At this point, I just want to protect the next generation from misery as much as I can.
Should have linked the proper source, but jwz did, anyway, just in case: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
Although the dig at functional programming doesn’t appear on that page.
That’s because it’s from one of the older ones.
Ah, I didn’t see the navigation.
I think what most impresses me about this meta-blog, besides it being funny, is that whoever is writing it has kept it up for five months so far (23 weekly “issues”), and is not skimping on actually reading the comments (at least for a few I spot-checked, the pithy summaries really do summarize the comments). I could see myself finding it funny to start a blog like this, but I doubt I’d have the dedication to hate-read / hate-summarize HN as an ongoing, months-long project. Maybe the author can’t help reading HN regularly, and writing this is their therapy.
I don’t think hate is a requirement here. There’s lots of worthwhile stuff to read on HN, but at the same time it can be quite a bizarre and hilarious spectacle to behold. These summaries are just a humorously cynical take on it.
There are quite a number of good articles, but most of the discussion is better skipped (except for those who want to amuse or horrify themselves).
Hands down one of the funniest things I have read in months!
There used to be this (serious) monthly pdf of the top hackernews articles, with the articles expanded with a bit more details. You had to pay for it (not much), but is was a nice way to read interesting articles without all the fluff. Hacker monthly it was called, I believe. Too bad they stopped, anyone know of something similar?
This is great. I’ll probably skip HN and head here.
Went into it expecting just a lot of anger. There is that, but what’s brilliant is that this post is still funny even if you’re one of those people being made fun of.
These are really mean-spirited (if funny), but given that Hacker News is Hacker News I can’t bring myself to feel bad.
JWZ is ahead of the curve in recognizing Y Combinator (“Brownshirt Combinator”, to use his terminology) as part of a new fascist movement. I don’t think that Y Combinator intended to be fascist from the outset, but it’s headed that way. Its main goal is to concentrate cultural power and social capital, and originally that was for an obvious profit motive, of bringing Paul Graham from third-tier wealthy (by Silicon Valley standards) into the “three comma club”. Now, it’s about something more. I don’t think that Graham himself is a fascist, but he’s also basically retired. The new people are after power. JWZ was one of the first people to spot Y Combinator for what it really was.
For example, it’s obvious now that their reason for buying Quora had nothing to do with investment but was purely about editorial control. The good news is that they seem also to have driven Quora into irrelevance.
What I’ve been enjoying in 2017 is having been proven right, with them in the wrong. I got banned from Y Combinator (and later endured a six-month effort by these people to ruin my life) for (a) exposing Kalanick’s misogyny, back when he was a Valley darling, (b) pointing out that Marissa Mayer was dishonestly representing layoffs as firings for trumped-up performace reasons in order to evade the WARN Act, and (c ) linking to Giles Bowkett’s dramatic reading of a Paul Graham essay. I’ve been proven right about pretty much everything. Uber’s sexual harassment culture, as in (a), has been exposed earlier this month; and Yahoo! has been sued for (b), which I knew they were doing just as I know that Mayer learned that trick at Google. Over time, people will realize the truth of this industry and that I was prescient by at least five years.
I basically agree with the content of what you’re saying, but I think it would be better received without the repetitive “hey guess what I was right the whole time” tone.
Fair point. I understand that “I told you so” wears thin.
The thing is: I’ve fought fascists and I’ve suffered. I’ve lost job opportunities because I had the gall to stand up for human decency and for progress, fighting to keep light alive while darkness closes in. There was a lot of sacrifice in this, but I hope that history’s judgment will be that I helped humanity to win the fight.
So I’m glad to see some recognition for my side of this. It’s a start and it’s long overdue.
The roasts of FP are always lazy as hell (pun intended, I guess). FPers aren’t insecure about monadic I/O, so you can tell the audience of the joke is smug greybeard types who think maintaining a collection of screensavers means you are sufficiently engaged in the industry to accurately critique its trends. Better targets include the ridiculous types or how you can’t write tail recursive functions without worrying about the stack overflowing thanks to laziness.
I read the whole thing in the tone of a greybeard curmudgeon, although I think it has just enough lightheartedness along with smugness to be funny.
The same guy has yearly reviews of FOSDEM that are also pretty funny, but perhaps more overtly curmudgeonly, and give some clues about his technical preferences.
Lots of good ones there. I love it when titles set themselves up for destruction:
“Leihs, the leading free equipment booking system It took us eight years to get it right. What we learned about being a FOSS project. not a mis-paste. it took them EIGHT YEARS to learn how to keep track of their shit. ”
I’m going to defend Haskell on this. Yes, laziness is not very intuitive, and the types can be complex. However, laziness is relatively easy to work with. It’s not correct to say that Haskell is always lazy. The difference is that it’s an opt-out model for laziness as opposed to opt-in: you can have strictness, but you have to ask for it explicitly.
On the types, I’ve realized that there are 3-month tools and 20-year tools in software. Some are optimized for short-term productivity and others are optimized to make you productive over a long career with a number of complex, difficult projects.
Haskell is a 20-year language in a world where most people want simpler, 3-month languages. If you take time to really learn it, it’s extremely powerful. However, you can’t spin up a Haskell team to meet “Q3 OKRs” or whatever the idiots are calling that stuff these days. As an individual, you have to invest time to learn the language, and as a company you have to invest in your people to get anything out of it.
Unfortunately, I think the reality of this industry is that the 3-month languages are going to win. If you’re a software engineer, you’re going to be changing jobs every 1-2 years and will often not be in charge of the tool stack.
While I think there’s plenty wrong with HN (which is why I usually come here), I think most of these are pointlessly negative or outright wrong. This reads like someone who feels left out and is trying to convince themselves that they didn’t want to be included in the first place, which is a weird attitude to have about HN.
I don’t think that anyone’s bitter about HN, because it’s easy enough to create an account.
I think that a lot of people get upset when they realize that they made career mistakes because they were sold a bill of goods by people like Paul Graham.
The truth is that you don’t get years back, and that the VC-funded world ruins the careers of most people who enter it. At 35, the bankers and lawyers and academics are established professionals with solid reputations and connections, whereas people who’ve been kicking around in VC-funded startups are too old to be taken seriously in their own world and, not only do they almost never have the financial independence that they were promised, but the world starts laughing at them because they’ve worked in kiddie jobs (Agile Scrum and open-plan offices) for too long on a promise that never game through.
The story we’re told is that if you join a startup and it fails, you’ll just hop into an SVP-level position at Google or Facebook. That might happen for the extremely well-connected, but most of us just get fired when we join startups that fail. It’s all a fucking lie, and when people realize this, they get bitter and either (a) have boiling hatred issues or (b) have an altruistic desire to prevent the next generation from making mistakes. I would like to say that I’m pure (b), but I think that all of us lied-to ex-techies are some mix of the two.
Personally, I’m less bitter as I get older but that’s because I realize that I’m not entirely innocent. I worked for tech companies for a long time, which means that I accepted payment from organizations that were hurting people, and in an industry largely dedicated to making the world worse. I’m miserable, but I deserve some share of that. At this point, I just want to protect the next generation from misery as much as I can.
[Comment removed by author]
Bril.