Why Paul? Why Did You Change It? (About Hacker News)

http://www.centernetworks.com/y-combinator-hacker-news

by transburgh • 19 years ago

37 45 19 years ago

hhm• 19 years ago

I don't agree. I think this Hacker News idea is fantastic. Some time ago I proposed a "classic.reddit.com", the idea being the same: having a place where we could have the good old reddit, or rather, where we could have intelligent news back again.

pg3• 19 years ago

Because we ourselves were bored with reading about nothing but startups. If our site was boring to us, it was probably boring to the audience we intended it for.

This is hard for business guys to understand, but the people who make the best startup founders often don't care about business very much. Some of the most successful companies started next year will be started by people who do not currently plan to start companies.

sherman• 19 years ago

What if some people want to read only about start up news, but don't want to sift through items that are hacker news, and vice versa?

Maybe we could have a "sort by category" feature?

menloparkbum3• 19 years ago

Couldn't people who only want to read about startup news just read TechCrunch?

jamongkad• 19 years ago

Agreed but does this apply also to guys who just care about building a great product? and don't really much care about making money from it?

davidw2• 19 years ago

Thus part of its appeal - by not having too much stuff, we didn't spend too much time here, and went back to working on more productive pursuits.

I'll give it a week or two before any hand wringing. Let's see how it works out.

dean3• 19 years ago

I don't like this idea. There are already many places on the net to find out about hacking. But this is the only place I've found for good stories about startups (of course, I stopped looking after I found this place). From what I can see, there is much more to a startup than hacking. And there are more kinds of people involved with startups than hackers. It is a disservice to the startup community to change the focus here.

Besides, this site already has somewhat of a hacker focus anyway. Look at these items from the top-ten at this moment: #3 Coding Horror: Discipline Makes Strong Developers #5 Blueprint is a CSS framework #6 How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary #9 We are living in someone else's computer simulation

Not exactly business ideas.

And while you may be bored with reading this site, I don't see you as the typical audience here. I see this site as being for people who are in startups or thinking about doing a startup and who want to learn as much as they can. Not for people who've already been through it and already know all this stuff, like yourself. Even if Startup News began as your baby, I think you have to let it go.

In short I think your initial premise is wrong. Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.

zcoelius• 19 years ago

Second what Dean said. Lots of good hacker news places. Very few good early stage startup stuff. Too conflate what YC was with TC is silly. TC is a profile site. YC.news gathers helpful articles on how make your startup better.

I'll miss YC news if it becomes just another programmer site.

BrandonM4• 19 years ago

Why does any of that matter? This is PG's free site, which he has invested his time in and has asked nothing back for. Who are you to call anything associated with this site a "disservice"? That is patently absurd.

If you are not happy with this site anymore, you are free to go start your own. You should not be free, however, to sit idly by and condemn the decisions of those who are aiming to make progress.

pg3• 19 years ago

> Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.

We use ourselves as a proxy for the audience we want to visit this site. This is reasonable, because we were the type of founder we like to invest in.

It may sound presumptuous to use yourself as a proxy for the audience, but this is how a lot of good things came about: the Porsche 356, the Apple II, Google.

Keios2• 19 years ago

Dean,

1. This site hasn't stopped being about startups.

2. Lots of people are bored with just reading about startups. Because beyond a point you need new material to spark interesting thoughts. Like many others here I am an entrepreneur for over 3 years and am now working on a web startup idea myself. I find stories such as #3, #5 and #6 useful - they contribute directly to my goals. Remember what stays on top is still decided by the people. And we won't go down the 'digg' path unless the audience that submits and votes changes - which is a problem I am certain PG is aware of and he has made references to some solutions that he is trying to put in place for keeping the stories interesting.

3. I have found that I find stories that PG submits interesting. As long as that is true he is a good measure for the typical audience.

4. Finally between stimulus and response I have freedom of choice. I will up vote only stories I like and I think that might be a great way to participate in the content.

Thoughts??

iamwil• 19 years ago

When I was working at an engineering job at a research lab, I was told what had to be accomplished. Of course, the degree of freedom, amount of creativity, and problem solving you can do varies from project to project, but in the end, I went to bed happy knowing in the back of my mind that someone, somewhere asked for whatever you're working on--that's why you're getting paid. When you're a startup founder, however, you aren't even sure of that, mostly because of the nature of startups and the markets they decide to persue.

A startup can be successful in an already crowded and proven market--especially if the market sucks (online dating comes to mind). But often times, where startups shine is where others fear to tread, and that's in potential markets, unproven markets, and useless markets (until you prove that it isn't).

But how do you figure that out? And given that you see a potential, how do you find a creative solution to build a business from it?

I don't think anyone can tell the future when it comes to these things. But you can certainly learn to get a good intuition for it. One of the ways to do that is to constantly read broadly about interesting things that are going on in the fringes of any number of industries. By interesting, I mean, things that you didn't know that stretchs your understanding of the world and perhaps your imagination a little bit more. When you start to get your finger on the pulse of possibility, you're able to see blooming solutions where others only see wilting dead-ends.

In addition, when you dig deep enough into any topic, it gets quite interesting. You'll start to find that all subjects are intertwined in one way or another. The way all subjects are compartmentalized in school is just so students don't get confused. But really, all subjects are inter-related. Sociology's studies on coordination and biology's study on social insects actually relates to optimization. Weather phenomenon actually relates to crytography. This inter-relatedness works to your advantage in finding creative solutions to make a business out of your new market, because creative things are usually a combination of old things put together in new ways.

Contrary to popular believe, creativity isn't often completely out of nowhere, just as masterpieces don't just materialize in front of masters. For every masterpiece you see hanging in the galleries, there are hundreds of sketches and throwaway paintings that you don't see the master artist practicing on. By the same token, a creative solution for a startup isn't just a stroke of inspiration from nowhere. It's a culmination of a slow absorbing of interesting tidbits that you've gathered and processed in the back of your mind until you've put the relevant pieces together.

So as far as I can tell, Paul Graham views hackers that are startup founders not as just really really good programmers. He believes what makes these people good startup founders is their innate curiosity in the world around them, and the willingness and drive to keep on learning about it to produce and create solutions--which lead to profit if attacked in a business way. That not only drives their strengths as programmers, but as thinkers and builders that change the world and will make money doing so. Not trying to put words in his mouth, but that's my best summary thus far.

Therefore, if you buy into that, then I think the direction into the new YC news as Hacker news is a good change. It will allow people to keep seeing and learning interesting things so they have a better gut for potential and emerging markets, as well as helping them along in their creativity for novel solutions. That is, at least my take on it.

Of course, we'll see how it actually all plays out, but I for one, am looking forward to the change.

menloparkbum3• 19 years ago

I'll posit that the "startup" theme was what was responsible for all the self-help-SEO type posts.

I'll gladly put up with arcane posts about how to configure your emacs environment to write haskell if it means I don't have to see anymore inane posts about improving my credit score by "track suit CEO."

aswanson• 19 years ago

As long as you can block out "xbox 360 halo level 3 mods/secret code" type posts I welcome the delta.

DougBTX• 19 years ago

What would be really interesting would be some sort of hidden A/B testing...

nickb2• 19 years ago

I posted this in another thread: why not start a NEW website hackernews.org or something and leave this site alone? Why mess with success?

This site is, after all, a subdomain of the YC site which is an early stage investment firm. n.yc.com made sense since it dealt with YC company news stories, VC investment, angel investment etc. stories. If you wanted to get funding from YC or wanted to learn how VC investment procedure works, this was a perfect complement to the main YC site. Now n.yc will become another reddit and will get flooded with all kinds of nonsense and will get a lot of "how do I haxor my ex's myspace account" since "hacker" really means cracker to like 99% of the internet population. Instead of spending 10 min to get an idea what the latest trends in investment community are, you'll have to spend 20+ minutes while. As for being bored and you're a startup founder, you're in trouble! And if you're really bored and need to read something, there's plenty of reddit & digg subdomains that are interesting.

This new site will lose focus and will degrade into another digg or reddit. Second law of (thermodynamics) Internet almost guarantees it. Paul, if you want this site to become bigger and grow and become a better reddit and all that, why not get a new domain and start it there? Why destroy what works?

simen2• 19 years ago

I guess the existing user mass is a big reason why changing focus instead of starting again is preferrable.

Personally, I don't care about startup news, so I didn't bother to register until now; obviously I think it's a good idea. Perhaps my opinion doesn't count?

davidw2• 19 years ago

Presumably existing users are smart enough to track another site.

It has some downsides too, such as overlapping content, but it might not have been a bad idea.

dean3• 19 years ago

>"Personally, I don't care about startup news..." This begs an obvious question. Why visit a site on a topic you have no interest in?

BrandonM4• 19 years ago

Or, you could realize that this is the perfect opportunity to start your own site called "nickb's aggregation site covering exclusively startup news"

zach• 19 years ago

That's ridiculous. It's just making clear what should have been clear from the start, which is that news.yc is news for Y Combinator people, not just about their startups.

Hacker News is also much less bland. And for those hackers who don't think they're interested in startups, it's more tempting! (Muhahaha! Come, hackers, and catch the chronic startup syndrome!)

bmaier• 19 years ago

I don't know Paul but having followed here for a while and having read most of his work I'll offer you two reasons:

1) The site was losing its usefulness for him so he made it more useful for himself and chances are others will find it useful as well.

2) Because He Can

Perhaps if you don't agree with the changes, then write your own news app and compete. Its how the world works after all.

webology• 19 years ago

Change is good but I think you mainly just stated what the site was becoming anyways based on the content as of lately. Hopefully, everyone can keep their politics in their basements and the hacker theme stays. That's why I stopped reading reddit daily. Now there's a politics sub-reddit but it took less then a week for it to junk up their homepage again...

gojomo• 19 years ago

Another long-term factor to consider: startup enthusiasm ebbs with business cycles, while hacking endures.

awt• 19 years ago

I like the change.

daniel-cussen• 19 years ago

I agree with the change. After a while, all the startup articles sound exactly the same. 10 tips for starting a startup...10 tips for dealing with VCs...what it takes to succeed...

Andys• 19 years ago

I think the new algorithm is going to make the site less adaptable to new concepts and ideas in the future, if a just few of the big users vote them down. The type of stories voted up high will get stuck at a local maxima in story space.

motivi• 19 years ago

Bad idea. What distinguished this site was the news on startups. If you want tech news there are hundreds of good sites out there. This becomes one more. Look at dzone, slashdot, and many more.

Why Paul? Why Did You Change It? (About Hacker News)

Related Stories