HN is part of Y Combinator (obvious from the URL) so there has always been a bias toward entrepreneurship and startups.

In practice it tends to be mostly content from bored engineers. Any social website like HN is inherently biased toward people with the most time to burn, because they have the most time to post. It turns out a lot of modern engineering jobs have a lot of free time at your desk in front of a computer, so those are the people who post here most.

The actual entrepreneurs are usually too busy to post too much on HN so they aren’t heavily represented. Not absent, of course, but it’s hard to compete with the people who seem to have infinite free time for social discussions.

HN can be interesting, but it’s really difficult at times to separate the signal from the noise. There’s a lot of noise.

It has nothing to do with free time. It’s just a numbers game. There are a lot more employees than there are entrepreneurs.

A browser extension with some custom filtering rules could be handy. I'd love to never open another blog post from someone who thinks finding out that becoming internet famous for two days is bad for you is some kind of revolutionary insight and that everyone needs to hear about how stressful it was to be tweeted at a lot.

Count me in that group. I am a refugee from Slashdot, after I had found out I hated their new threading UI.

The original core audience was Paul Graham fans as far as I know. I think I found HN because it was the thing Arc was used for.

I always thought the bulk of HN was tech folks that got too old and grumpy for reddit.

I'm pretty sure there are at least four or five HN users who have a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. We're not all unsuccessful.

judging from the upvoted topics there are probably more marketing/hr/managerial people now than engineers/scientists

Well, Im a shameless imposter masquerading as an employed software engineer. Thats one. Or two maybe assuming you are?

My primary work title is Dad/Homemaker, and I have an interest in software development for improving learning, for one.