Urban Dictionary on Hacker News (2013)

This was from 2013. The general climate here has turned pretty hostile to startups since then. The prevailing advice here is now to land a FAAMG job and slack off with a high standard of living, rather than slaving away at a startup to boost someone else’s capital. What remains is people sharing their side projects, going off-topic and wasting their time one way or another.

Reminds me of when 4chan pretended to be Hacker News.<p>Thread archive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;desuarchive.org&#x2F;g&#x2F;thread&#x2F;48696148" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;desuarchive.org&#x2F;g&#x2F;thread&#x2F;48696148</a><p>HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9788317" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9788317</a>

&gt; <i>A website where unsuccessful entrepreneurs with egos waste time browsing articles and websites, created by wanna-be entrepreneurs with even bigger egos who are trying to build a following.</i><p>&gt; <i>A place unknown to financially successful entrepreneurs.</i><p>I always thought the bulk of HN was <i>not</i> entrepreneurs but employed engineers, curious minds, etc. Have I been deluded all this time?

&gt; A place unknown to financially successful entrepreneurs.<p>That&#x27;s because YC founders fled to Bookface many years ago, YC&#x27;s internal Hacker News.<p>A YC founder once saw me browsing HN and said &quot;Huh, are you on Bookface?&quot;<p>I realized later that he&#x27;d never been to HN.

One thing i noticed is that most of the conversation here feels alien to me.<p>I think this is because most of the people here are living in California and they seem to have a very particular world view not always compatible or even undertandable for anyone from any other place.<p>I used to enjoy this website in like, 2015&#x2F;16 i think, now the topics are not even tech related anymore.

2021 version would have to include:<p>Upvote anything with Rust, Go, SQLite, or Haskell in the title; use the words “orthogonal” and “Pareto” as much as possible.<p>Hate SPAs, Docker, crypto, and someone using the word “crypto” for cryptocurrency.

Fair or not, but more and more lately, when searching the web for a useful take on a framework, library, language, or anything else related to computers, I put in a &quot;site:news.ycombinator.com&quot;. This way I skip past the multiple pages of blogspam, advertising (disguised or otherwise), and people copying each other&#x27;s top-ten lists, and might actually see a thoughtful comment or someone&#x27;s real experience.

We&#x27;re not _all_ unsuccessful entrepreneurs, I for one am an unemployed programmer!

The first thing I thought was Mark Cuban was the wrong guy to use as an example.<p>(Always felt Cuban got lucky during the early days of the gold rush. I feel that way about most financially successful people though?)<p>I think that definition missed a few HN personality types.<p>It forgot unsuccessful, lonely, egotistical, disenfranchised, shut-in&#x27;s---like myself.

&gt; Hey Mr. Cuban, did you see that post on Hacker News?<p>It&#x27;s amusing that&#x27;s the supporting point line, because whoever wrote the entry is placing their self in the category they&#x27;re trying to peg HN with. I was in business with Mark across a bunch of years, he has always had an interest in news, news aggregation sites, information acquisition and delivery in general. He was familiar with Hacker News, including understanding its association with Y Combinator, and he always liked it when BlogMaverick posts hit the front page. He understood its relevance in the tech ecosystem.<p>For years after Mark set up his venture capital business, he (his team) used Y Combinator&#x27;s various public docs as the foundation for the investment agreements.

Interesting (also funny), I never thought of HN from that angle. Does this feel true to HN users or is it more a joke?<p>While I was transitioning to a software job I found myself checking HN a lot because it seemed like a raw discussion forum for what software engineers were thinking &#x2F; talking about. Seemed better than Reddit. Still haven&#x27;t found a better alternative.

It is good humor.<p>An Onion article would be even greater praise.<p>On a more serious note, I for one plan on continuing to lurk and comment here until I achieve the unprecedented entrepreneurial financial success that I know my lurking and commenting here more than qualify me for!

There is also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ShitHNSays&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ShitHNSays&#x2F;</a>. It&#x27;s not that active but it has quite a few gems.

I like hacker news for tech news and career subjects, but indie hackers is where the founders seem to hang out. If I need to talk to somebody about bootstrapping, ih is great. A lot fewer technical people though, lots of site builders and no code setups. Hn users can write a bst in their sleep but ih users can make a landing and validate an idea while building a mailing list in their sleep

I think we all make the mistake sometimes of attaching too much weight to the opinions we read online. For some reason I attach more weight to HN opinions but after meeting a few frequent HN posters in real life and seeing recent discussions about vaccines, I no longer do this.<p>I realize this is a really shitty post and I wish I had the time to rework it to sound less prissy.

I find funny because it’s accurate !<p>99% of entrepreneur fail , that’s literally why it’s hard and why it’s highly respected !<p>Remember when Tesla almost went Bankrupt ? It’s very like because it happens almost three times... and only now after 25+ years Tesla is making a profit by selling its cars without sorcery finances...<p>Being an entrepreneur is hard , I love the Tesla example because even if Elon Musk had the vision and a superior engineering delivery , the company was technically a commercial failure for more than a decade.<p>Being a better than average engineer ( probably a LOT of HN uses ) is unfortunately not enough to become a sucessfull entrepreneur !

I&#x27;m aware of the philosophy behind HN and the dictionary entry alludes to this. From my experience it&#x27;s more focussed on technology and a liking of knowledge in general.<p>On the other hand, I still find this amusing.

There’s also a critical HN parody site <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;n-gate.com&#x2F;hackernews&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;n-gate.com&#x2F;hackernews&#x2F;</a> Copy paste url as it apparently intercepts the HN referer

HN is a lot of &#x2F;r&#x2F;iamverysmart except some people actually know something.

I&#x27;m surprised there is no Encyclopedia Dramatica entry on Hacker News.

This thread! Talking about ourselves in an ironic &#x2F; un-ironic &#x2F; post-ironic way. There is room for more meta hacker news.

Perfectly described, now I&#x27;ll search for WallStreetBets, that I visit very frequently.

I would have been more interested in the Encyclopedia Dramatica page about HN ;)

Seems about right to me.

Entrepreneurs? Dang, I thought this was a forum for programmers.

Haha this is funny. Don&#x27;t take it so seriously folks ;-)

Isn’t urban dictionary maintained by ESR?

Seems relatively accurate

An accurate definition

&gt; hacker news<p>Where opinion is being manipulated by the U.S. security&#x2F;military complex.

everything2 used to be more like that.

can confirm, am unsuccesful