Say, March 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080302094434/http://news.ycomb...

Some of the headlines: Logo Design Trends 2008, Microsoft May Buy Email Startup Xobni, Rumor: Microsoft about to unveil web-apps strategy, The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing.

Doesn't sound so different. Maybe May, 2010? https://web.archive.org/web/20100524025853/http://news.ycomb...

Headlines: Facebook’s ‘Like’ button makes me lonely, Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits, Google Map Mashups are About to Get a Lot Better, Amazon's Universal Wish List button.

Okay, maybe from last year, as OP mentioned: https://web.archive.org/web/20130214172414/http://news.ycomb...

Headlines: The United States Redrawn as Fifty States with Equal Population, Disqus bait and switch, now with ads, Berkshire and 3G Capital to Buy Heinz for $23 Billion, I Was a Political Prisoner at Birth in North Korea, How Silicon Valley Fosters Plivo's Cloud-Based Telephony.

Nope, sorry, I don't see it.

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

On the other hand, I think there is at least 10% chance that this is a troll/joke though..

The main change I've noticed in the last year or so is the rise of altcoin and NSA news - but having said that, when I joined there was a lot of TSA articles.

I think the OP is making the classic mistake of only remembering the good bits - "Summers were always hotter when I young", "4chan used to be good", etc

HN at the weekend, for example, is much more like r/programming, the quality of comments is much more mixed, you still get some great discussions, but there's a lot more commentators who don't really seem to get programming or startups or business, there seems to be a lot more clueless people. And the weekend is when all those god-awful self-improvement articles get voted up.

The thing I do miss is the Show HN: posts of new startups, and they definitely have gone as Ask posts seem to have been heavily penalized so they drop like stones.

tl;dr: I think there have been a shift from hacking the technology to hacking the finance.

MySpace, Facebook, Delicious, Yahoo, TechStars, Y Combinator, if anything they were even more than now.

I'd rather have finance hacking (I was thinking bitcoin) than yet another article on the NSA.

http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

So the fact that this comes now, not in September, is an exemplar of the Eternal September, not an exception.

That said, ones needs to define what the word hacker stands for. Until 5 years ago, I'd agree that a hacker is a computer geek with strong ties to the security field. Nowadays I am not interested in security as much as building up things and I don't believe that the word should have these kind of restrains anyway.

The average user level on HN is really high for my standards. I see posts ranging from bio-informatics, to mathematics, economics and world politics. But more importantly I see insightful comments from people on and off the discussion field. So yes, this is a hacker's community and the name is appropriate IMHO.

That's not supposed to be here. Those topics tend to end up in pretty lame discussions.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming for example.

People that are interested in pure hacking stuff already found better sources, like good subreddits.

As an example, I submitted a website about a project of our own a couple months ago and got 4 points. Never made it past the "new" page.

A month later, someone else submitted exactly the same project and got 70 votes, getting to the front page and resulting in about 30.000 visits to our site.

Same content, different user.

So is this site about interesting content? Or about WHO submits this content?

And different day, different time, different selection of users looking at /new.

I'm not saying there isn't favoritism (and I don't think that's necessarily bad), but there's also plenty of randomness involved.

You get about an hour on the first page of the new page. There need to be enough faces that are interested in your topic reading in that hour.

Actually, this same complaint pops up like every two months at max and if it were true each time HN would be TechCrunch by now.

I don't care about boring news coming from TC/Mashable/... Now HN is only about:

-Facebook -blogging shit -why no women in IT ? bouhouhou we are all macho jerk.. common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here. -"How Xcompany raised x$$, and why you should definitively not listen to these advices..." -"Hey guys i'm a rich mofos working in IT AMA..."

1. Go back on reddit 2. Why so many Commercial/marketing bullshitters ?

This site is less about technology and more about how to make money from technology.

The various corporate movements of big tech companies is not 'Hacker subculture' and never was.

If you are over 14, maybe the reason people care about misogyny in technology is folks such as yourself providing a good object lesson.

Last months they were at least more than 2 post per day about this subject on HN frontpage.

This is not relevant anymore, and coming saying to us "IT guys" that we are all macho ass*, every single day is totally counter productive. And i don't know if you guys in the US are total douches but here in Europe we respect Womens @work

Also, maybe people wouldn't think you were a macho jerk if you didn't act like it. Hint: normal adults don't say things like "common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here". Boys trying to act macho do.

Yet you are still here, reading and commenting...

Why?

When there's any technical discussion that interest me, I believe 95% of participants don't have any idea what they are talking about, and 5% sort of know better but are wrong.

Yet I still come. I don't know why, it's like an obsession. I can't explain it.

Maybe for the occasional interesting link that appears every couple of days and I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

Nah, it's not that.

Yet it was good enough to keep you coming back for four years?