>It's worth noting that "hacker news" was probably never meant in the sense of "excellent programmer", but rather in the sense being criticized by the article:
I think your notation is revisionist history.
Here's an example of a PG's use of "hacker" from 2001. PG is very much talking about "hacker" as an above-average programmer not content with an inferior "blub" language:
YCombinator was started in 2005. The "Hacker News" was started in 2007.[1] The audience it intended to serve was the type of "hackers" mentioned in the 2001 essay.
PG also later uses "hacker" in the sense of a tech nerd who would rather focus on a startup rather instead of being discontent working at a corporate job. This definition of "life-hacker" is also not relevant to the article's definition. The article is talking about programmers who serve VCs' agendas instead of pursuing their true desires. PG has never advocated that. The essay also complains about the VCs who are pseudo-hackers because of their monetary influence. PG isn't talking about them either. Ergo, this website was not trying to attract them as an audience. (The "demo days" does try to attract VCs but that's an event separate from the website.)
One can look at Internet Archive Wayback Machine[2] and see that the front page was dominated by topics unrelated to "chasing the money". Just a bunch of tech geek topics. Programming languages, algorithms, etc. It was very much "news" for "hackers" in the positive connotations of that term.
The matter of whose history is "revisionist" depends on perspective, and it's really hard to say whether your or my perspective here is the right one. That said, painting my notation as revisionist appears to be inaccurate.
> YCombinator was started in 2005. The "Hacker News" was started in 2007.[1] The audience it intended to serve was the type of "hackers" mentioned in the 2001 essay.
Are you sure about that? Plenty of large companies have worked to build cultures around their products. Should we really trust YCombinator's motives more than, say, Apple's when they build a product that claims to be geared toward makers while gradually pulling said makers into a particular ecosystem?
In other words, just because YCombinator / Paul Graham claim Hacker News to be geared toward technical-loving programmers and tinkerers v. VC-backed (or prospective VC-backed) entrepreneurs doesn't mean that neither of them are lying to us or themselves.
> PG also later uses "hacker" in the sense of a tech nerd who would rather focus on a startup rather instead of being discontent working at a corporate job.
That happens to describe a lot of people who wouldn't be classified as "hackers", or even future ones in their larval stage. It also happens to describe many (if not most) startup founders of the variety being criticized in the article.
> One can look at Internet Archive Wayback Machine[2] and see that the front page was dominated by topics unrelated to "chasing the money".
There were a lot of technical topics, yes, but "dominated by topics unrelated to 'chasing the money'" seems to be false, seeing that the top result has a plug for a startup called "ThriveSmart" and is basically how why some startup uses Rails, result #4 is Betteridge's-Law-invoking clickbait rhetorically implying that VC-backed startups should for some reason be ashamed of themselves for not towing to puritannical sensibilities regarding pornographic content (though, to be fair, Paul Graham did post in that article's comment section calling it out on said puritannical and rather hypocritical bullshit), result #7 is about having dinner with YC folks and being acquired by Conde Nast, result #8 is about Caterpillar making money through "Web 2.0", result #16 is a WSJ piece praising the open-office concept and disparaging cubicles "because it's what Silicon Valley does, and therefore deserves attention for some reason", result #29 is some blog post about entrepreneur burnout, and result #30 is a rather-uncritical NYT piece on advertising strategies of large businesses. I haven't even gotten to the second page yet.
And yet you cite this as proof that my viewpoint is revisionist somehow. Yeah, there were quite a few awesome technical articles back then, but even back then the Valleyesque distortion cuts through the purported hacker-centric focus of HN.
This isn't to say that Paul Graham wasn't or isn't an excellent hacker, nor is it to say that his own definition of hacker back in 2001 was somehow incorrect or out-of-line with the proper (and admittedly nebulous/vague) definition, and nor is it to say that he or YCombinator had motives out-of-alignment with the purported target audience. Rather, it's to suggest that maybe - just maybe - folks around here are taking the "hacker" part of "hacker news" too strongly at face value when its YC heritage ought to be warranting at least a small grain of salt, and that a lot may very well have changed in six years.
>Are you sure about that? Plenty of large companies have worked to build cultures around their products. Should we really trust YCombinator's motives more than, say,
It's fine to be vigilant about subliminal marketing or secret motives (hailcorporate![1]) but I think in this case, HN is transparent in its goals.
If HN is brainwashing us to redefine "hacker" to suit their needs, what is their end game? HN doesn't have ads. They don't have constant popups nagging us to pay for a subscription. They do have periodic "YC Random Company is hiring" posts (if you consider those "ads"). But they also have the weekly hiring posts from non-YC companies. There are the weekly posts about "basic income" and "minimum wage should be $15" and "programmers should form a union" that routinely make the front page. Those are not topics the money men like to push. Any time a "Uber taxi" thread is posted, the top comments always complain about the "sharing-economy" being a VC-funded scam on society. Lastly, the vast majority of readers will never submit an application to YC so that link is also mostly irrelevant.
In other words, if HN is tricking us with a redefinition of "hacker" to suit their nefarious agenda, what have they gained and what did readers lose?
>It also happens to describe many (if not most) startup founders of the variety being criticized in the article.
Your interpretation of the article is incorrect. The article explains[2] how some startup entrepreneurs with counter-culture tendencies, rebellious attitudes, and subversive agendas can be neutered of their free spirit and be put into the service of entities with money (VCs, Barclay's so-called "hackathon", etc) -- the "yuppies".
The article is criticizing the "yuppies" and not the startup entrepreneurs that might enjoy articles currently on HN front page such as "Reversing NvAPI to Programmatically Overclock Nvidia GPUs" and "Go and Rust – objects without class (2013)"
>the top result has a plug for a startup called "ThriveSmart" and is basically how why some startup uses Rails
I guess one can see whatever they want to see. To me, that article is a Rails article, and the secondary trivia is that the company happens to be ThriveSmart. If that article was written anonymously with no company mentioned, one of the HN commenters would inevitably ask, "where do you work?" and the company name would be revealed in the comments. People try languages, frameworks, databases, and they also tend to work at companies. The company is part of the color of the presentation. If we got manipulated by ThriveSmart exposure 8 years ago, I don't see evidence of it. The other articles on the front page are topics hackers voted up. It doesn't mean every article is a programming article about Lisp or MongoDB.
>- just maybe - folks around here are taking the "hacker" part of "hacker news" too strongly at face value when its YC heritage ought to be warranting at least a small grain of salt, and that a lot may very well have changed in six years.
To proof to me is what types of articles show up on the front page. HN's audience is not all uber-Lisp clones of PG but the intended audience is definitely not the "yuppies" that the article is criticizing. I can't see how anyone can look at the HN front page as a whole and conclude it is designed for "yuppies" instead of "hackers".
[2]I believe there are so many misinterpretations of his thesis because he writes in a very convoluted style but here's an example excerpt of author's criticism of yuppies: "We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones."
> If HN is brainwashing us to redefine "hacker" to suit their needs, what is their end game?
Promoting the startups YCombinator has funded over the years? Promoting YCombinator itself for prospective entrepreneurs looking to get funding? Those are the most obvious ones.
> Lastly, the vast majority of readers will never submit an application to YC so that link is also mostly irrelevant.
In a "vast" majority of even a thousand people, that's still up to a few dozen or so in the minority. And YC would have plenty of motive to encourage that minority to grow, and especially for said growth to have YC in their list of seed funders to apply to because "well they host Hacker News and I'm a Hacker News regular".
Everyone has ulterior motives. Just because YCombinator doesn't explicitly state "Welcome to Hacker News, where we basically cozy up to you in the hopes that you'll apply for seed funding and consultation from us so we can make money off the success of your business" doesn't mean that such an ulterior motive doesn't exist.
I'm probably being excessively critical, of course, and maybe YCombinator really is totally benevolent and running Hacker News out of the goodness of its venture-capitalist heart. It's hard to really know, however, and for that reason I tend to err on the side of caution.
> Your interpretation of the article is incorrect. [...]
How does any of that paragraph invalidate my remark? Just because someone has "counter-culture tendencies, rebellious attitudes, and subversive agendas" doesn't mean that they're suddenly "hackers". You need creative ingenuity and a desire to understand how things work, and those traits don't come automatically with the ones you mention.
> To me, that article is a Rails article, and the secondary trivia is that the company happens to be ThriveSmart.
You're probably right that I'm characterizing that one a bit harshly. To me, though, it reeks a bit of the whole "look at us, we're hip and modern and use Rails so you should totally buy our hip/modern/Railsy product". Especially considering that the product in question happens to be a web development product.
Not that there's something particularly wrong about this - as a buyer of services, the technological implementations do often matter to me, since it gives me a vague idea of whether or not the service I'm buying will be sufficiently-reliable for my needs. It's just that, having been on the other side of that (first-hand experience with companies that want to show off their tech as an advertising tool for prospective customers, talent, etc.), it strikes me as an advertising-first, tech-second article, and I tend to believe it important to recognize such things. Being aware that you're being advertised to is an important part of making wise market decisions; an unawareness of the influence of some subtle bit of advertising can mean the difference between a reasoned evaluation of a product and a gung-ho "this product looks good" based on hard-to-self-identify confirmation biases.
> To proof to me is what types of articles show up on the front page.
As it is to me; on some days the technical outweighs the business, and on other days the business outweighs the technical. As you said, though, one tends to see whatever one wants to see. Perhaps you're looking at HN through rose-colored glasses. Perhaps I'm looking at HN through dirt-colored glasses. It's all a matter of perspective.
I think your notation is revisionist history.
Here's an example of a PG's use of "hacker" from 2001. PG is very much talking about "hacker" as an above-average programmer not content with an inferior "blub" language:
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
YCombinator was started in 2005. The "Hacker News" was started in 2007.[1] The audience it intended to serve was the type of "hackers" mentioned in the 2001 essay.
PG also later uses "hacker" in the sense of a tech nerd who would rather focus on a startup rather instead of being discontent working at a corporate job. This definition of "life-hacker" is also not relevant to the article's definition. The article is talking about programmers who serve VCs' agendas instead of pursuing their true desires. PG has never advocated that. The essay also complains about the VCs who are pseudo-hackers because of their monetary influence. PG isn't talking about them either. Ergo, this website was not trying to attract them as an audience. (The "demo days" does try to attract VCs but that's an event separate from the website.)
One can look at Internet Archive Wayback Machine[2] and see that the front page was dominated by topics unrelated to "chasing the money". Just a bunch of tech geek topics. Programming languages, algorithms, etc. It was very much "news" for "hackers" in the positive connotations of that term.
[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071016064109/http://news.ycomb...