Over the last two decades, HN (and hacker culture in general) has shifted from a creator-oriented, anti-authoritarian (both left and right) culture to one supporting the establishment. I suppose that was inevitable - someone has to build the tools of surveillance capitalism at Google and Facebook.

Would you describe YCombinator as part of 'the establishment'?

In my recollection, HN has always been pro-YC and pro-venture-capital-in-general, for obvious reasons :)

Eh, I wasn't really referring to venture capital in particular, more the general philosophy. For example, here is an essay on the word "hacker":

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

This sort of attitude is definitely not the one held by most coders at BigStartupCo today.

Personally I would say HN never had the anti-authoritarian/punk/anarchist ethos of 1990s cypherpunks, rather than having had it once and lost it.

HN culture has always seen multinational companies like Amazon as something to aspire to become, billionaire investors as heroic risk-taker allies, and lauded small companies that get brought out and shut down for achieving an exit.

There's nothing wrong with that, HN's culture is still perfectly valid. But HN hasn't lost an anti-authority ethos, it never had one, from the moment the URL ended with ycombinator.com

HN still has a general pro-civil liberties, anti-surveillance tech vibe. Snowden was praised here, Palantir denounced. In this past year this stance has led to a rise of anti-China posts. But I'd also characterize HN as getting increasingly more skeptical of libertarian/classical liberal/neoliberal economics as well, and so would have a dim view of utopian seasteading libertarians.

This, so much.

It's because those who are invested in seasteading tend to have libertarian, if not outright objectivist or anarchy-capitalist ideals, and thus their commitment to free enterprise at the expense of other values are seen as suspect, or at least are accused of behaving as such.