[mkelly]

Warning: crazy rant coming.

So this is what HN has degenerated to? I'm sorry, but I remember eagerly reading the front page, learning things from interesting articles, and -- more importantly -- reading well-written commentary from people far more accomplished than I. I lurked, because I couldn't contribute at the level that most of the regular commentors could, but I learned a great deal.

HN has retained its preoccupation with not being reddit (which is noble), but has not retained the quality to justify it.

Great communities are transient, and HN is probably what taught me that. I have nothing but respect for pg, and for the community that once populated HN.

Peace. I'm out.

Crazy rant done.

[lunaru]

To be honest, I feel the same way, but maybe there's a good explanation for the relative decline of "quality".

I think I started lurking HN back in 2007 (which I also believe is the first year of HN). I remember feeling a euphoric sense of being overwhelmed with great content from knowledgeable people and articles. I learned a lot about start ups. I learned a lot about programming. I learned a lot about partaking and consuming thoughtful commentary in a semi-anonymous setting.

But you know what? All of that content is still here, in different formats. The audience is bigger and so there tends to be more mainstream stuff on HN now, particularly around politics. But I think the biggest change is in myself. I've read the same stuff about lean startups at least 100 times now rehashed in different ways. Even though I've never raised money from a VC before, every time I read something on HN about it, I feel like I've been through the process dozens of times. Every 37signals blog post that gets submitted seems like a rehash of the last one. So most of the submitted content around those topics seem like old-hat.

At some point, when you continue to consume the content from the same sources for years on end, you're going to see more repeat episodes and you'll have fewer stimulating moments. That's just the nature of it - and I think it's just as important to recognize that we're transient individuals. Your probably a different person now with a higher capacity and understanding and that's probably in part thanks to HN.

[5hoom]

Your finding the articles less interesting could be a function of you becoming more knowledgable yourself, therefore there is less "low hanging fruit" with regards to new knowledge for you to acquire.

Might be a sign that it's time for you to start posting some well-writen commentary yourself ;)

[djcapelis]

Dude mkelly has known why a[5] and 5[a] were the same damn thing since before there was an HN. Stop making bad assumptions, he's telling a true story. I'm sorry to see him leave just as I realized he was here. Oh well.

He's not the only one saying these things. It's just how it is. After awhile, what was is no more. HN stood longer than most.

[djcapelis]

I'm sorry, but I'm happy to get voted down for my tone for once. I remember a time when one could assume that people around HN had a basic CS education and the community didn't get fascinated by stack overflow threads about how C works because we were all thinking about crazy interesting things.

I think anyone who says that people don't have a right to miss that and assumes that there is no problem is part of the problem.

[mkelly]

This is a very good point.

I'm this is true to some extent, but (as much as I'd love to wholeheartedly agree with you), the reason I don't consider this likely is this: the main reason I have this opinion of HN is because of one 3-month period in 2009, where I was off the grid (bought a car in Europe, drove around, drank lots of booze, smoked some mushrooms, &c). I assure you I didn't learn about computers during that time. When I left in June, I thought HN was full of insightful articles and comments; when I returned in September, I thought it was markedly worse. I think HN had its Eternal September then, and it's been steadily downhill since then.

(Um, yes, I was keeping track of replies, and logged back in to post this. Mea culpa.)

[5hoom]

My apologies if my post sounded disrespectful in any way though.

I wrote my post from the perspective of being a long time lurker on various tech forums who is only just beginning to feel I may be able to contribute on some topics (and only after many years of coding, reading & sponge-learning from sites like this one).

If it weren't for stories like this & people like yourself engaged in insightful discussion about them I personally would have missed a lot of "assumed knowledge" in the developer world, heck I wouldn't have heard of K&R (the shame!).

So I guess what I'm saying is: please don't leave, stay & help make us noobs less ignorant!

[edit] context

[pyre]

I think that it's general knowledge that a[x] is a + (x * sizeof a). The idea that a[x] could be reversed to x[a] is probably not common knowledge though. I don't necessarily think that a[x] = x[a] would be "C 101." I've certainly never come across any C code that uses this property and I can't really think think of any good uses for this property that don't end up ruining the readability of the code. And in general, it seems a rather useless property that, as others have stated, is just a side-effect.

I could just as easily claim that HN has 'degenerated' if someone posts a Stack Overflow post about what the /o flag does on Perl regexes. Or maybe there will be a Stack Overflow post about how substr('abc', 1, 1) == substr('abc', 0, 1) in Oracle because it helpfully translates the 0 index to a 1 index. I mean, it's right here in the Oracle docs[1]:

  When position is 0 (zero), then it is treated as 1.

It's Oracle 101!

[1] http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/olap.111/b28126...