Agreed with your post whole-heartedly.

However, I do wish HN had a more robust and effective method of forming relationships. That's where profiles and messages to users, etc. come in brilliantly.

If I don't hit HN at least 5x a day I feel depressed. It's an amazing place and reminds me in a weird of way of IRC back in the day.

Long live HN and hopefully we can make more relationships, collaborate and build cool shit.

The biggest problem I have, as a developer, engineer, entrepreneur is simply the LACK of quality talent. Here in Los Angeles, 90% of people are clueless and live in oblivion (and live on FB and Instagram), the tech scene is non-existent. You have a small group of "silicon beach" characters, who are more interested in just saying they're entrepreneurs in the tech business because it "sounds cool" while lacking any skill. I'd say here we have <1% of actual true developers, engineers, hackers; people passionate about technology and building companies.

I can't even begin to describe how many dinners, meetings and calls I have on a weekly basis with people pitching me "social startups", some kind of "diners club startup" or a "subscription model clothing company." It just makes me sick (and sad at the same time).

Relationships with people genuinely talented and passionate about technology - that's what I'm after with this concept.

That's unusual, here in the UK, we have a large amount of untapped talent without the quality employers, the average wage for a web developer in the UK is in the £20k-25k range and job satisfaction amongst the ones I know tends to be quite low, it's a much different scene.

I come on HN to dream about moving to CA, because one day one of these job ads will apply to me.

In fact, I would argue that Hacker News is more social than "a traditional social network": there is much more active and deep discussion that occurs here than I've ever seen on, say, Facebook.

That's probably because Facebook is really just a way to satisfy narcissistic needs. I've seen to many people writing their diaries on FB, open for everyone to read, trying to grab attention. In a way, a lot of publication platforms are like that but FB has become the worst kind.

Also, the technical nature of HN attracts a different kind of users, who are more open to deep discussion on interesting topics. That's just a part of hacker personality I guess.

For socializing with an audience, a platform like HN is a lot better than FB. For personal communication, Email is still the very best thing we came up with, even though we can video chat, make VoIP calls or instant message. To me, Emails are an entirely different form of communicating, just as letters were back in the old days. Almost every other form of telecommunication tries to mimic real life conversations in one way or another, Email doesn't. I like that.

Bottom line: There's nothing except for advertising and handling sensitive information carelessly that Facebook is truly good at these days. But that's - as always - probably just an opinion.

Agreed. E-Mail is still my favorite tool for communicating and I don't see this ever changing. Long live email.

And yet, I tend to read comments without looking at usernames. I'd argue it's more anonymous then "a traditional social network". Both more social and more anonymous, oooh creepy.

I would (and have) argued that browsing a site like this (one heavily discussion oriented) without keeping track of with whom you are speaking (enough to read their history, maybe do a Google search or two) is overly dehumanizing: the people on this site, possibly only by pseudonyms if not actually by real names, have histories and interests and are generally real people.

Too often, then, people get into arguments that are really nothing more than "cultural crosstalk" (affecting everything from word/idiom choice to argument style); it also makes it more difficult to interpret things people say, as we normally smooth over common mistakes by way of the implied context of knowing who the other person is, and thereby can predict "what they meant".

(By the way, totally unrelated, but I can't reply there anymore, and no one else did at the time: yes, AFAIK had you implemented Amazon's one-click system, even without knowing it existed, you would have been liable; however, you would only have been subject to "damages" and not to "treble (triple) damages", which is designed to punish people who knowingly disrespect patents.)

I normally read through comments and only look at the username if it's a particularly good comment, sometimes I follow the person.

Better than 700 friends I barely know.

The 700 friends who aren't really friends. So true.