Meh. All the kids are chasing the AI money, so there's a lot of AI idiocy crowding out the good stuff.
You kids get off my lawn.
Just keep in mind hacker news is hosted by ycombinator, which helps match Stanford and UCB CS grads with slightly older Stanford and UCB grads (with a smattering of MIT and UIUC grads) who will give them money in exchange for shares in relatively poorly managed organizations pumping highly speculative "products."
The objective isn't to make anything interesting, it's to make money so the Stanford and UCB grads can continue the cycle. That being said, some of these companies do interesting things by accident. And not all of them are hell-scape "sincerity begins at 90 hours per week" code-monkey zoos.
The "interesting" stuff seems to come out of open source projects (See Dick Gabriel's "Innovation Happens Elsewhere.") But sometimes you get overlap.
But the venue is (largely, but not exclusively) for kids whose interest in their startup extends 18 months to the moment they can sell whatever ISOs they collected and move on to the next cash vehicle before eventually "retiring" as a Facebook or Verizon VP and write think pieces about how <foo> is a game-changer and will change the way we think about media for decades to come. (Where <foo> is: cryptography, corba, J2EE, SOAP, AJAX, P2P, Bitcoin, Mobile, Python, VR, AR, OpenGL, Swift, Go, RISC-V, Rust, THE CLOUD, <bar>-sharing, ML, AI, LLMs, CNNs, TensorFlow, ChatGPT, etc. and <bar> is ride, home, spouse, etc.)
But no, I'm not bitter.
(Seriously though... fads come and go. HN is sort of like the Soap Opera Digest for Sili Valley's amnesiac creatives. Dig deep enough and I'm sure you'll find SOMETHING, even if it's a rant. And the half-life of memory in our community appears to be a couple of years. So just wait a bit and you'll get another wave of recent grads who just discovered LtU or the Jargon file and we'll get more interesting posts. But the kids are all right and eventually they figure out why us olds did the stupid stuff we used to do but will re-create some pretty interesting stuff after realizing the constraints we thought were unchangeable are just illusions.
Sturgeon's Law applies here, but there's definitely some good stuff if you dig. Also, it's possible your interests have gotten more specific and what you're seeing is things that are either very general or... as you mentioned... outside your interest list.)
This is the reason I've decided to upvote only personal blogs of people that are actually writing about something that's not the next big thing, it's not trendy, it's not a buzzword. The random the article is, the arcane the subject is, the better.
All the kids are chasing the AI money, so there's a lot of AI idiocy crowding out the good stuff.
I don't get this take at all. AI is hardly something specific to "the kids". Hell, AI has been the part of C.S. that I've been most interested in dating back to about 1992. And I'm creeping up on 50 real fast here. And I couldn't be more excited to see all the progress we've made in recent years, on the AI front.
Now granted, there is a little bit of a "pop" in interest right now specifically around LLM's and the GPT-x stuff, and probably more than a few silly startups being spun up that aren't really contributing anything new. So if that's the "AI idiocy" you're talking about, then OK, that part I can get. But underneath all of that, there's some legitimately fascinating research going on and some really cool stuff happening. IMO, of course.
You're almost 50. Like I said, AI is something the kids are doing.
And yes, I'm mostly talking about the idiotic things when I say "AI idiocy." In this case, "idiocy" modifies "AI," it's not supposed to equate the two. In other words, I think there's idiocy of an AI flavor that's pushing out legit content (AI and otherwise) on HN.
There's definitely a trend (and to my eyes a lowering of quality) on this site over the past couple of years. That's easily attributed to the downturn (possibly allied to the increasing social influence of the site) - so I'd suggest it's the "90%" in Sturgeon's Law waxing and waning over time (albeit it seems more waxing than waning when viewed over longer timescales).
Never forget, a lot of people on here weren't even born when "Accidental Empires" came out.
I've been here for over a decade, it's more or less the same. Instead of AI, we had #nosql, and instead of Substack hot takes, we had Medium hot takes. The only thing that's really changed is the velocity of posts, and volume of comments. Also, there used to be significantly more tech articles than there are now.
You kids get off my lawn.
Just keep in mind hacker news is hosted by ycombinator, which helps match Stanford and UCB CS grads with slightly older Stanford and UCB grads (with a smattering of MIT and UIUC grads) who will give them money in exchange for shares in relatively poorly managed organizations pumping highly speculative "products."
The objective isn't to make anything interesting, it's to make money so the Stanford and UCB grads can continue the cycle. That being said, some of these companies do interesting things by accident. And not all of them are hell-scape "sincerity begins at 90 hours per week" code-monkey zoos.
The "interesting" stuff seems to come out of open source projects (See Dick Gabriel's "Innovation Happens Elsewhere.") But sometimes you get overlap.
But the venue is (largely, but not exclusively) for kids whose interest in their startup extends 18 months to the moment they can sell whatever ISOs they collected and move on to the next cash vehicle before eventually "retiring" as a Facebook or Verizon VP and write think pieces about how <foo> is a game-changer and will change the way we think about media for decades to come. (Where <foo> is: cryptography, corba, J2EE, SOAP, AJAX, P2P, Bitcoin, Mobile, Python, VR, AR, OpenGL, Swift, Go, RISC-V, Rust, THE CLOUD, <bar>-sharing, ML, AI, LLMs, CNNs, TensorFlow, ChatGPT, etc. and <bar> is ride, home, spouse, etc.)
But no, I'm not bitter.
(Seriously though... fads come and go. HN is sort of like the Soap Opera Digest for Sili Valley's amnesiac creatives. Dig deep enough and I'm sure you'll find SOMETHING, even if it's a rant. And the half-life of memory in our community appears to be a couple of years. So just wait a bit and you'll get another wave of recent grads who just discovered LtU or the Jargon file and we'll get more interesting posts. But the kids are all right and eventually they figure out why us olds did the stupid stuff we used to do but will re-create some pretty interesting stuff after realizing the constraints we thought were unchangeable are just illusions.
Sturgeon's Law applies here, but there's definitely some good stuff if you dig. Also, it's possible your interests have gotten more specific and what you're seeing is things that are either very general or... as you mentioned... outside your interest list.)