[javajosh]

There's lots of new stuff, but (luckily?) very little of it is worth learning. The universe of software is divided into worlds which were each founded with a certain set of assumptions, often long in the past, and everything that comes after is a test of how those assumptions apply to various real problems as they arise. They are essentially (social science) experiments in progress. The latter-day activities of one world are (almost) always inapplicable to other worlds. (The exceptions are very few, for example testing approaches, reactive programming, some functional techniques have managed to spread across worlds).

If you're going for excellence in your world, which is usually the goal of the staff programmer, you're better off focusing on the details of the world you're in - new libraries, releases, details of governance etc. Yes you should learn new languages now and again, to dip your toe in other worlds; that's foundational and good and keeps you agile. But most of the stuff you see on HN isn't foundational, and so you don't really need to pay attention to anything not happening on your world.