Why HN always has the most pompous, snobbish posts appearing on the front page?

4 points by jolarkin 1 year ago | 3 comments

I get the posts where people discuss databases and servers and programming languages. I don't get the posts like below, from the first two pages:

-Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books

-Shift Left Is the Tip of the Iceberg

-Nickel Plating Handbook

-Decisions and Dragons

-A Man of Parts and Learning Fara Dabhoiwala on the Portrait of Francis Williams

Are they synthetically pushed to the top to water down the tech content? Is there an astroturfing effort from the posters? Or is there general interest in that stuff and I'm the only one who's dumb?

taylodl 1 year ago |

Let's break this down.

It's called Hacker News. It's not a site dedicated to news about hacking, but instead news that hackers find interesting. So, a lot of subjects are going to get covered.

Okay then, who is a hacker? In the broadest sense, it's people who create things in the technical and engineering fields - technical creators you could say. It's not just limited to computer science.

Altogether, this makes for a lot of topics that would be interesting to the community. Being largely STEM folk, you'll find a preponderance of STEM articles here - but of course you'll find articles on just about anything else too!

theGeatZhopa 1 year ago |

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Here you can look up the algorithm. But I think it's what gets the clicks and upvotes, that gets promoted.

So. It's a community thing, I guess.

snikeris 1 year ago |

A Man of Parts and Learning Fara Dabhoiwala on the Portrait of Francis Williams

This was the best thing I’ve read all year. If you don’t know why it’s on Hacker News, then you didn’t read it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42185626