skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's not forget it happens in the actual cities we live in as well! Hipster-ism gives way to gentrification and then the cool kids move because there are way too many yuppies. Same things happens with suburbs - they get too crowded and people start moving to the country to make new suburbs.

This is just human nature, it manifests itself in the clothes we wear, the cars/bikes we drive, the places we live, it certainly also applies to social websites. I'd be surprised if it doesn't - we'll see how facebook fares, or if there will be a coolkid exodus as the rest of the world gloms on.

It's basically a (sub)cultural arms race that everyone fights in.
A diff of past front pages would be interesting. Some historical front page entries:

2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/

2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/

2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/

2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/

2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663
Agreed -- I've always enjoyed my debates with you. I'd go so far as to say I sort of miss them. But I've now grown so frustrated by the pedantic replies that I get on HN nowadays that I've had to start deleting my comments after I write them. And I've stopped visiting as often because it takes too much effort to write a response that I feel avoids the trollish responses I fear I will get.

One of the final straws for me was when the title of my submission about being replaced as CEO was changed -- a topic of significant relevance to this audience I think. What frustrated me most was that I had picked a useful title and the not only was the new title worse in my eyes, but it was surrounded by rather inane posts about the "top X reasons for Y" or something about Apple or Google. It just didn't add up for me.

And on a tactical level, there is unquestionably a tendency for people to respond to the top post rather than start a new top-level thread. The lack of collapsing of threads is quite frustrating on long topics.

For now, I'm mostly done here.
Maybe you should compare random /active pages from years back. I don't know, I only found out about /active this last month, but I'm guessing the problem will be more visible there.
I think the plan is to switch to a more recent queme core.
I must show my HN immaturity here by admitting I don't know what that is :)
Stuff white people like: mobile, social games
Well, obviously posts/discussions like this can actually be contributing to the "problem" as some see it, but I'll make one point I don't see made here.

For me personally, I've learned a lot and grown a lot over the course of the 4 years I've been lurking and occasionally contributing here. So for me, a smaller percentage of the stories/articles/posts/discussions appear as insightful as they once did. I don't mean to knock HN in any way, in fact my point is that that fact is not a "problem" to me. New users are joining everyday and everybody who makes the effort to learn and contribute gets something out of HN.

It's what brings me back 17 times a day.
I'm also migrating my blog right now, so don't mind if I do! Thank you!
What was the point of this comment? (I'm asking seriously; I want to know what it is you're specifically trying to communicate here).
Most of us that have been around since the beginning (this is my second account) are too busy to participate as regularly as we once did. I'd rather spend time on my business than get hooked on discussions here as much as I did in the past. I will jump in here every so often and I still think HN is relatively great. Doesn't everybody remember the big debate over even linking to Techcrunch articles? We have always been whining about what's wrong to realize that this place has consistently been pretty great.

And sure, we might be like that dance club that's a bit too mainstream. But pretty soon those early cool kids grow up and are also not cool enough to discover the next hot thing. The next HN will come about and it won't be somebody from here who starts it.
Interesting to note that the first ".com" domain was symbolics.com

I used a symbolics machine to code list back in the 80s.
Rate my startup - Slowcop - measure your website's speed
It's one thing to adapt a classic story or classic elements in a new form, that's how all writing works. It's another thing entirely to work within a narrow confine of sequels and reboots of a single story.
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher and MG Siegler spark a vicious catfight
> Am I the only one on HN that's about sick to death of the "PHP developers are children/idiots/bad programmers" meme?

Most of the developers are bad. Assuming a normal distribution, pretty much half of them are below the average and average is not usually something to brag about.

That said, languages that stand a higher chance of generating employment should attract those that don't want to learn new programming languages (something good programmers tend to do) and want to make their bets on sure technologies. I expect programmers interested in Lisp, Haskel, Erlang, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Forth, Smalltalk to be, on average, better than those who choose Java, C#, PHP or Visual Basic. Of course, not all of those who choose these languages are bad programmers (and the opposite is also true), but I bet you will find more mediocre programmers on the second-group.

(burn, karma, burn)
For me, I noticed it when people started posting things from investor blogs and the VCs and angels themselves started commenting here. I think that spurred some small handful of users to start showing off how smart they were in hopes that they'd get a response from fredwilson or whoever, and that just naturally spread the way it did. (There's a certain high when you get fredwilson or msuster to respond to your comment on their blogs; I think it's the same dynamic here.) I'm not blaming the VCs at all here - but that's when I started noticing it. (joshu and yegg are the exceptions that prove the rule because they're hackers first.)

Also, I've been told the Something Awful community is surprisingly pretty awesome, although I'm not a participant there. If there's some intersection of structure/moderation between MeFi and SA that HN could implement, I think that'd be a great place to start.

sighs We complain because we care. It doesn't mean that we have all the answers or we're pointing fingers. It means we're so invested in finding a solution to this problem that we won't just move on. Given just how good HN was (and remains), minute changes are more noticeable. I don't think a comparison of then-and-now really gives us useful data. There's just a gestalt, a feeling, you get that something's not quite the same. The closest I can think of is when you're out to dinner with someone you've fallen out of love with; your routine isn't any different, but you just know that it's not the same.
This should get you up to date, then: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118325. :)
Just because this has been the typical website lifecycle in the past, doesn't mean that it has to be the typical website lifecycle in the future. We increasingly have better and better tools to manage how people interact with sites and communities.

Upvoting/downvoting, filtering, disemvoweling, moderation, tagging, reputation systems, etc. are just a smattering of the tools we have available and with time it's likely that we will see more and better tools for community management available in the future.

The most important thing is for "us" to define exactly what current and past features of the community we want to preserve and also decide what kind and amount of "chaos" we want to permit to allow the site to evolve and improve. It makes the most sense for PG, YC founders and very high-karma users to be responsible for defining these community characteristics, ideals and values.
much fewer lines of it.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. HN is succumbing to the problem pg tried to address: dilution. Thing is, reddit already came out with an excellent solution with their subreddit system. This simply wouldn't be an issue if there were different sections for tech, hacking, programming, startups, science, finance, and general interest. Keep all of the deeply technical stuff in one place, the cruft in another. Let's face it, the people who are complaining about lack fo deep tech are also likely to read and enjoy one of Spolsky's blog posts. There's no need to ban the latter to protect the former, just keep them in separate sections.

Now, HN isn't trying to grow, so there's no need to have user-created subreddits (sections, I suppose). Just make 8 or so that people care about, and add another if there's sufficient demand.

I really shouldn't be crediting reddit with this, as the solution existed long before them. All HN needs to do is follow the forum model and have different sections. It's too big to only have the front page.
You answered your own question: they differ in price and softness. There's a "basic TP" niche and a "premium TP" niche -- and maybe a couple more, but not many.

Okay, you say, since no two products are exactly identical, how is my talk of niches not vacuous? Because it's not enough for the products not to be identical: they must be differentiated in the mind of the market. That is, the differences must matter to at least some part of the market. If you have a small market share, and you are unable to differentiate your product from its competition in some way -- price or features or both -- your market share will go to zero. The world is littered with examples; I'm sure you can think of plenty yourself.

Ask any angel or VC you know what they think of a business plan that proposes to capture a small fraction of a huge market, without laying out a viable marketing plan for differentiating the product.
Check out this (slightly simpler) Doom-style engine (loaded with a portion of a Doom map even!) running on a ti-84+^: http://benryves.com/journal/3739423 Texture-less, but a far more impressive feat in my mind.

^16MHz Zilog z80, an 8-bit cpu.
I doubt it will ship March 2. They haven't given a new beta OS to developers, and they don't want all apps to be broken on launch day.
How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal.

Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else.

As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site is predicated on karma as a quality indicator) and the idea that people who write insightful comments won't upvote crap stories.
Who said anything about firing? How does hiring one guy on to join the team == firing of all of the previous guys? Is there a one man network security team rule at Valve that I'm suppose to know about?
I think this may be due in part to people learning how to target Hacker News readers with their article and blog post headlines, so while the front page would look similar, the newer linked content is more fluffy.

I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the content.
Ask HN: Why does it cost money to post on online job boards?
I'm curious as to why it costs money to post on job boards. Is it mainly to filter crappy listings? Or because they know they can make money?

It seems like it would be easy enough to build a website for free with minimal overhead and have very targeted advertising to cover costs / make a profit.

Also -- shameless plug -- if you're a RoR hacker: http://gopollgo.com/about/jobs
Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows!
hackerbuddy.com reminded me of a dating site. I am still waiting to be paired up with someone.
curious: what type of software makes up these 'demos'?
Here is the download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...
It's true you didn't say "me-too product", but it's an important point. There are lots of me-too products in the world, so a lot of people do think that way.
Rent control has been a pretty effective way of preserving the identities of communities in cities. It's not perfect, but it helps. Concepts similar to rent control can and should be applied to sites trying to preserve certain characteristics.
I'm really glad I'm beyond the phase of my life where I think living with roommates is a good idea... for any reason.
bought 1gen. will buy 2gen.
There will always be a place for innovation, regardless of how software is architected. Gluing libraries together may seem like an ignorant approach to how a system truly operates, but these are powerful tools and allow the development of massively powerful (if inefficient) systems quickly and cheaply. I don't know why people fear abstraction so much, the same arguments have been made regarding assembly and memory management, but these become less pertinent (or more accurately, niched concerns) every day.
Sounds great. A key section to this email could be showcasing the sessions I actually attend (which is often quite different than what I RSVP for!). Will there be any check-inesque functionality for sessions?
Pretty interesting idea. Has anything like this ever been tried with other communities?
Is this overreaction and appalling misuse of the word "misogyny" really needed for satisfying self-expression nowadays?
From what I gather AOL didn't really "fuck" with Nullsoft, they kept working on what they wanted. Justin & Co. got bored being a big corp subsidiary and needing to work on WinAmp (which is what they were acquired for). And so it just didn't really whip llama's ass for them anymore, they escalated and quit. Effectively it was them fucking with AOL, not the other way around.
The basic complaint is that social sites grow into mobs. The solution is rather obviously: halt growth. You have to limit the number of active users to some vaguely Dunbar-ish number or you inevitably wind up with a lowest common denominator mob.

Metafilter did this, right? For a couple years they said "No new accounts."

I think scaling a social site to a very large number of members without deteriorating badly is impossible. It's a matter of human nature and mobs.
Osama Bin Laden, Stockpickr, and Everything I know about Negotiation
Interestingly, this isn't a problem related to any particular category of site. Hell, look at 4chan: bitching about newfags and how /b/ isn't good anymore, how /b/ was never good, different factions with different ideas on how to fix the problem (or what the problem is, or if there even is one), spinoff sites where the early adopters migrate to...

This isn't an HN problem, it's an Internet problem. pg could probably do some things to ward off dilution, but it won't last forever. Interestingly enough, Something Awful seemed to be pretty damned successful in this regard by doing the unthinkable and charging people to post there. I'd hate to suggest it as a solution, but it has been effective in the past.
citation needed

By my research Bollywood's total annual revenues are barely a third of Hollywood revenues for theatrical releases alone (aside from dvd, broadcast, and digital distribution revenues).
I think a good strategy is to get your minimum viable product out as soon as possible and call it a beta. Don't charge for the beta and provide plenty of warning to existing clients by signalling early on your intention to charge for some/all features when you are out of beta. After a private beta period, this is how I'm planning to handle Mighty CV, a resumé building app with hacker leanings that I've been working on. I'm looking for private beta users to kick the tyres a bit, so if you feel inclined then you can sign up for the private beta at http://www.mightycv.com.

I always remember being impressed with the way Heroku did things in the early days. After beta feedback it must have become clear to them that it made sense for them to rewrite from the ground up. This left them with a beta platform which they gracefully continued to support, renamed herokugarden, whilst also rolling out the paid for service. They then provided plenty of info on how herokugarden users could migrate to the new Heroku platform for free too. I'm sure they learnt a lot early on about what direction they needed to take the Heroku platform. Anyone remember the web based code editor? Without the early feedback from beta users perhaps they would have pushed more in that direction instead of changing course towards the Heroku we all know and love today.
Box office returns at an all time high? With or without adjusting for the increase in ticket prices (i.e., I seriously want to know how many tickets were sold per capita)?
I'm not talking about ideas that angels or VCs like, I'm talking about running a real god damn business. Your mind has been twisted into thinking like a VC. You're talking about the toilet paper market having niche market segments. Are you out of your mind?

Angels and VCs want 100x+ multiple exits. Business people don't need that, or anything at all like it. What they need is a business with customers.
The fact that HN hasn't been overrun by marketing zombies is why I'm not too worried about its direction. If linkbait titles are the big complaint about submissions, it's a good sign.
How is this better than Y!Slow?
Quicksilver: Smalltalk implementation in Javascript
Work in progress, but seems to be pretty slick and have decent performance.

Right-click on the "desktop" to bring up the toys. :-)

Author's blog is here:

http://silversmalltalk.wordpress.com/
People who are deeply invested in a site want to defend their view of how it should be. Change is threatening, and it's easy to react with knee-jerk hostility.
Random numbers can also you in trouble in this way. E.g. anything with 666. The hard part is cross culture references that you may be unaware of.
I have to agree with hartror. If the founders leave then what are you left with? It sounds great in theory that a team can keep the motivation and innovation coming but ultimately that's the job of the founders - and founders aren't easily replaced.
Update here:

http://anthonyf.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/a-month-of-work-on-...
The language is overwrought, but it is true that there is a significant, noticeable difference.
More detail here: https://www.fis.dowjones.com/WebBlogs.aspx?aid=DJFVW00020110...
Ever seen the job boards on Craiglist? They're free, and they really suck. The signal to noise ratio on both sides becomes horrendous.
I think this would just breed resentment, or at worst Lord Of The Flies/Robbers Cave style anarchy.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Realistic_con...
It's definitely not what Alex is semi-proposing but I've been running RubyFlow - http://rubyflow.com/ - for a few years now and it totally stole the MetaFilter model, just for Ruby-only stuff. No "votes" and points scoring - just interesting posts from people in the Ruby community coupled with me editing posts for format and deleting anything that's blatantly spam or offtopic. Seems to work though I have been tempted to go in the voting/Reddit/HN direction with it.. maybe I shouldn't!
It's true, it's not _that_ hard.

But it is harder than simply implementing something that directly helps me.
LoseThos 64-Bit Operating System V7.01 Released
Awesome - something I've been looking to use actually.
5 stars, very easy to use.
SingAlong,

I have been working with remote workers from India for 20 years. I have not had a single experience compelling me to do so again, since 2000. The choice over the last decade hasn't been mine, but often the result of having to help US corporations solve performance and scalability issues, in conjunction with their on/off shore partners.

I could complain about how various companies from India and how US companies utilizing them have caused terrible harm (both to me and others directly) by a mix of negligent and non-professional behavior, but it has happened to a degree where the feelings have become generalized and deeply and sometimes even actively belligerent towards individuals.

You've received some excellent advice from bjonathan, but I'd also like to encourage you to provide a personalized blog. Include pictures or video about yourself.

Assume that half the resistance to working with you is going to be the dreaded "language barrier". If you can't provide directly transparent and creditable links to your work and references on LinkedIn, I suspect you'll have a very hard time obtaining meaningful work as an individual.

Keep in mind, however, that you're just out of school. You're going to need to do the same thing any other engineer will anywhere else in the world. Mature, gain work experience, demonstrate value, etc.
I don't know if that means they are open to H1B sponsorship or they mean you somehow already have a visa that makes you eligible to work without them sponsoring it. (I don't what that could be). That's why I asked, may be they would like to respond.
You're right, but he's also right- it "looks funny" and people don't like it.
I like it, nice job. Fast, clean and simple UI.
1. No website is free.

2. Building communities is hard and expensive (for both prospects as well as attracting listings).

3. The alternatives (recruiters) are really expensive (tens of thousands of dollars for some positions), the relatively small fee of these sites is very reasonable for most companies who are serious about hiring a new candidate.

4. This may sound odd, but companies like to spend money for services. If you have purchasing authority at a company you're more likely to go with a paid alternative even if its only marginally better, bosses are more interested in results than expenses (usually).
No need to download/install?
Was that a dig on my spelling your name wrong? Sorry about that.
*seiji
You (pg) will not need this since you have the data.. ;-).. but for anyone else interested in doing analysis over time, HackerSlide stores JSON representations of the HN front page every hour (starting Oct 15 2010).

http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json gets you what you want. For example: http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json
WiredTree in Chicago, IL
http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sad/2179868255.html
I like, could be good competition for keynote. Is there a way to show client time in the chart?
I wonder what Google's reading level rating mechanism would make of changes over time? Disturbing thought -- what about comments by poster?
Hmm, for some reason they forgot to include:

You sell your company for $50 million in Yahoo stock, which over the course of your two year tenure at Yahoo will see a tenfold increase in value up to $500 million and your team will use that wealth to go on to create a disruptive seed-stage funding group called Y Combinator.

Must have been an oversight. I can't imagine 37signals only telling half of these stories to make it better fit with their mantras.
In my experience (SF, LA) the rent control is there to prevent the gouging of yuppies, not to keep the poor people in. The idea is the city wants to keep rent just high enough to retain the rich people for the tax and spending base but low enough that the landlords to squeeze them out, which they most likely would do if given the chance.

It might be different in places other than California though, like New York.
Presenting Sticky Ideas
The problem is that people dislike the `smooth' sensation of high-fps video in their films- is there really something magical about a multiple of 24 that would keep that jerky feel?
Is your privacy worth $100?