[radicalbyte]

There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.

[mmooss]

> we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick".

Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?

[radicalbyte]

> Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?

Absolutely! It's just that the hopeful hacker/nerd culture used to be more dominant here (slashdot had the more cynical types).

Now there are a generation who don't know anything but Javascript but think that they're God's gift to programming. I can understand it as ZIRP resulted in the bar being dropped to the floor for jobs which paid SV salaries. Imagine earning that kind of money straight out of school and all you had to be able to do was implement Fizzbuzz.

The hackers ARE still here as are some really amazing people but this always seems to happen with communities. The only constant is change. And without change communities die.

[matheusmoreira]

The "hacker spirit" is dying.

Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that.

Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers.

It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.

[jack_pp]

I might get worried when mainstream computers won't be able to run Linux. Until then.. I'm not worried.

Seems there are efforts to bring openness to platforms that inherently have an interest to resist it and while the progress is slow.. there is progress

[cons0le]

>The "hacker spirit" is dying

This is the number one issue in computing today. Everybodys running around trying to get rich building shitty extensions and frameworks without looking at the bigger picture. We need collective action. Imagine a movement where everybody becomes millitant about adblockers. Like install them on every computer and deflate the advertising industry. Smarter people than me can probably think of better ideas

Right now its death by 1000 cuts. There needs to be a big change or we could lose everything in just 20-30 years in my opinion

[morshu9001]

As a hacker, I don't care about cookies or what the EU thinks about them. Disable them if you really care. Or at least use a browser that blocks 3P cookies (not Chrome).

[jterrys]

people still insist on using a browser built by a company that makes money off of ads and act surprised when said company purposefully compromises their privacy and data on said browser.

[GJim]

> As a hacker, I don't care about cookies

Well I care about privacy. And so should anybody with an ounce of common sense.

[Terr_]

What about when the lack of cookies makes everything break and you cannot work around it because it's too much JS to reverse-engineer, and/or it's a copyright-felony in your country to develop workarounds?

"I'll use my l33t hacker skillz to avoid it on my own" is a losing strategy in the long run.

A similar thing happens with the proliferation of cameras and license-plate readers.

[dewey]

As this is the message board of a VC fund it's not that surprising that it doesn't only attract hackers in the original sense?

[GardenLetter27]

Hackers should know the government is never on your side.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Hackers should know the government is never on your side

Never is naive. Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems. Those systems can be influenced and sometimes controlled by various means. And those levers are generally available to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and motivation.

[layer8]

Growth hackers aim for regulatory capture.

[vkou]

Neither are the billionaires and their deputies who both own and run all the megacorps.

99% of the current AI push is entirely anti-hacker ethos. It is a race to consolidate control of the world's computing and its economic surplus to ~5 organizations.

A few people do interesting stuff on the edges of this, but the rest of the work in it is anathema to hacker values.

[palata]

In a democracy, the government is its citizen. It sucks when you disagree with the majority of the voters, of course. But it's wrong to say that the government is against the majority of the voters: it was elected by them.

[NalNezumi]

A hacker should probably know that it's usually trade offs and blanket statements are very useless. Certain tools are good for certain tasks and situations, but bad for others. No free lunch and all that.

If you make that blanket statement, you're definitely not a hacker (or just a novice). But you'd make a heck of a politician or tech bro salesman

[purple_turtle]

That is an absolute nonsense.

At minimum, government will be useful as defence against worse government.

I know that some anarchist had dream of a stateless world, but it is not viable.

And while I am not going to say that any government is ideal, many are better than USSR, Third Reich or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

[poszlem]

The truly "eternal" September.

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

[antoniojtorres]

True that. I went to a building in SF that dedicated floor space to every adjacent field like robotics, AI, crypto, etc. Zero hacking or even cyber related space.

It made me feel kinda sad for a few days.

[cma]

It always had a lot of that, I would say 2-3% of articles were about SEO in the early days of HN. It was never slashdot.

[testfrequency]

Couldn’t agree more.

I’ve said it before, but the cynicism and weirdness that used to exist here has been gobbled up by a new wave of early stage tech evangelists who are just here to complain about ladders and levels.

It’s honestly been depressing to watch lots of good comments and posts go unnoticed, while the bait comments get all the engagement.

There’s also weirdly (ok, maybe not that weird) amount of casual hate on here now. It’s subtle, but I’ve been seeing a lot of negative karma and rhetorics that never used to exist here. I suppose it’s just “the internet” these days, but I’d wager HN has just grown too much outside the bubble it once was, and now we have a wide open door with lights vs the tiny alley way we once had.

[Terr_]

Some of that is attributable to raw inflow/outflow differences, where newer cohorts are bigger and therefore the blend would shifts even if no oldsters ever left.

[pipes]

In the last few years I think sentiment on hacker news has shifted from libertarian leaning to much mored left leaning. The same happened on Reddit a few years before. Anyway, just my gut feeling, nothing scientific.

[bitpush]

Keen observation both you and OP. We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.

Valid criticism is OK (I stand by crypto being a scam) but bring up any topic that is neutral to popular(VR, Autonomous Driving, LLM) and people are first to be luddites come out.

[radicalbyte]

I find it really hard to classify myself. I've always called myself a "libertarian" - I believe the best strategy to Civilization is to maximise freedom for anyone. As freedom enables enlightenment an enlightenment drives progress. To actually achieve that, in the real world, means that you have to distribute and limit power. That means limiting not only government power but also corporate power. That means regulation, strong regulators (breaking monopolies), policies to keep prices down (including rent/housing!) and to enable free market competition and innovation. And provide an economic system where risks can be taken, enabled by a social let (and social healthcare).

I felt that that was more common here 15 years ago before Big Tech pivoted into the cynical extractive and, in the case of the socials, net economic drag industry that it is now.

The really weird thing is that my views are considered both very right-wing (free markets, globalisation are great, maximal freedom, maximal responsibility, freedom of religion) and very left wing (strong regulation, policy to minimise rent/house prices, strong social net, progressive taxation and wealth limits, freedom to be LGBTQ+ etc).

[fsckboy]

>a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick"

your complaint was Unassailable Hacker® jwz's complaint about HN more than 10 years ago here's a link (many on HN complain that this is NSFW https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png since there are rarely complaints here that anything else is NSFW, I'd suggest people feel insulted by the message)

the thing that has actually changed since jwz's disgust is the site is now flooded by socialism, the antithesis of get-rich enthusiasm

[sandworm101]

The hackers are still here, lurking in the shadows. Bananas. They are just tired of being berated by fanboys anytime they criticize the will of the tech bros. There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.

[filoleg]

> There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.

That "AI slop replies" excuse you mentioned would only apply to the past 3 years at most (aka ChatGPT 3.5 release on Nov 30th 2022). While the grandparent comment's take felt true to my perception for at least the past 10-15 years, way before "AI slop replies" were even a remote concern.

[danem]

Am I the victim of the algorithm? Because all I see on HN these days is people pessimistic about tech and society. The tenor here is overwhelmingly negative.

Where are you seeing anyone defend big tech, tech bros, or any tech in general?

[nofriend]

This is such a laughable comment. Being in favour of a regulation - any regulation - is not part of the "hacker spirit". A hacker qua a hacker is interested in a regulation insofar as they can work around it, or exploit it to their ends, not to put one in place to directly achieve something. That's not to say all regulations are bad, or even that the GDPR is, just that HN being for or against it isn't proof of some demographic shift.

[bsimpson]

I don't know if it's a changing of the audience or a change in how people behave generally, but this place has been insufferable lately whenever anything remotely related to Donald Trump's administration comes up.

One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any other comment section.

[rootusrootus]

Yeah I still remember my first interaction with a supporter back in 2016. It was startling, and the first hint I had that politics was about to shift abruptly.

[nomel]

My rule for a sane HN experience: avoid and flag any articles related to Trump, Elon, <current culture war topic>, American politics, and anything tangential that summons them.

[taurath]

It’s a difference in values. To some, the ends justify the means and human life has no inherent value and the world is zero sum, and to some, a lying malignant narcissist deciding who lives and who dies is a personification of evil.

To some people, it’s literally a choice between that “lens of curiosity” and their families lives. But people for whom politics has never directly impacted them past a few % up or down in their paychecks can’t understand that, or feel safe in the idea that “they won’t come for me”.