[skrebbel]

I see your point and I agree with it. But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.

I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd be way richer right now if I had just taken a job at some bigco. Or kept doing consulting.

I don't feel that what I'm doing right now (building a startup because I can) is fundamentally different from my demoscene past (coding computer graphics because I could). Sure, some startups make some people obscenely rich, but the vast majority don't :-) It's not too different from art or AI hobbying or gaming or game modding in that sense.

[alexeichemenda]

> But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.

It is - Tikej's point isn't that it's not a skill - but rather that it's not the right place to share these. Think of the difference between a "Startup News" and "Hacker News". Hacker news used to be very deep on tech topics, now those deep topic have become more rare.

[bravura]

I remember an early pg quote where he noted that being a hacker isn’t supposed to be limit to coding or tech even, but all topics that hackers are drawn to and can ply their hacking in. Social hacking to bootstrap a userbase is a on-topic as far as that quote is concerned [edit: errant autocorrect]

[edouard-harris]

Interestingly, Hacker News used to be called Startup News in the early days.

[BrandonM]

Indeed, we’ve come full (half?) circle. IIRC, it was renamed to Hacker News in part to discourage meta-discussion on intellectually stimulating posts, questioning why the front page had so many posts that weren’t about startups. Now we are instead discussing startup post fatigue.

[dang]

You can see the reasoning here (Aug 2007): https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. Basically, pg got bored reading about nothing but startups.

[ximeng]

Interesting the idea that the original plan was that your votes count for more if you vote for the right kind of stories. Would seem to create an echo chamber effect where what’s already popular stays popular and new stuff doesn’t.

[dang]

It's impossible to say without trying it, and we never did. (Edit: actually I remember a conversation with pg where he said he did experiment with it, but dropped it. I don't remember why though. Maybe I'll ask.)

You could make the opposite argument: the "right kind of stories" includes being unpredictable (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so up-weighting votes from users who are good at picking those would lead to a less predictable, more interesting front page. Conversely, the median vote tends to be for the same few hot topics, leading to a more samey (as well as more sensational) front page.

My bet is that it wouldn't change much either way, because the problems with voting seem to flow from the voting mechanism itself, not from which users are doing it. Internet upvoting is the ultimate reflexive reaction, which excludes reflection, and reflection—the slower cognitive process which considers something before reacting to it and is thus able to see something new—is the quality that picks up on uncorrelated bits and makes for good taste. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

If that's true, then instead of trying to squeeze more signal out of upvotes we should add a new mechanism that encourages reflection over reflexivity. Flagging is closer to that than voting is, so something like an up-flag might be worth trying: i.e. "this deserves extra attention because of how good it is".

[woah]

Hacker News has always been the message board of the most famous startup accelerator out there.

[owlninja]

Very true, but it is hosted by ycombinator which exists to fund startups.

[littlemtman]

Hopefully I could bring you a deep tech topic !

[ehnto]

I imagine the OP is just bored of the generic startup technology churn cycle. It can feel as though the majority of "tech stack" articles on HN are just Yet Another Web Application Tool. We have solved making web applications so hard that we have ascended to meta-tools, tools that manage our tools or use our tools for us.

It is refreshing to be reminded of the myriad of ways computers can interact with the world! I recently refreshed my love for technology by getting into 3D printing, it's nice to have a tangible result for my efforts behind the keyboard. The machine is surprisingly rudimentary as well, and reminds me of old school CNC machines, so it's relaxing in the way driving a classic car can be. You can understand all the parts and their purpose intuitively, as they operate in the real world.