Seems to me we oftentimes also forget the "not so outspoken" devs, that just tinker away, doing their thing, without announcing every fart to the world.
People doing great work, without putting themselves into the spotlight.
HN culture doesn't merely forget about them - in fact, it aggressively excludes them.
Brilliant assembler programmer who likes to finish up at the end of the day and play with your kids? Fuck you, where's your GitHub profile.
Developing novel algorithms and prefer playing guitar at home to drinking at the pub? Fuck you, where's your conference talks.
etc, etc, etc. The broader culture of which HN is a microcosm spends a lot of time and effort devising filters to make people invisible if they don't fit a relentlessly self-promoting profile which has a questionable relationship with the quality of their work. I don't see Knuth and Cutler spending a lot of time on Twitter.
We cannot read what does not get written. We cannot discuss the merits and demerits code that is not public.
I'm in full agreement that HN is an informational bubble. I'm not so clear on exactly what HN is doing to aggressively exclude people. And where you see exclusion, I see an attempt to encourage people to join the discussion: "hey, why don't you put this up on GitHub so we can take a look", "this would make such a good topic for a conference talk."
We programmers are in a strange place that almost all of our work is covered by copyright such that it can't be shown to other programmers. People can assess our output, but not look at our code. We can't build a portfolio and take it with us.
Brilliant assembler programmer who likes to finish up at the end of the day and play with your kids? Fuck you, where's your GitHub profile.
Developing novel algorithms and prefer playing guitar at home to drinking at the pub? Fuck you, where's your conference talks.
etc, etc, etc. The broader culture of which HN is a microcosm spends a lot of time and effort devising filters to make people invisible if they don't fit a relentlessly self-promoting profile which has a questionable relationship with the quality of their work. I don't see Knuth and Cutler spending a lot of time on Twitter.