this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Maybe I should subscribe to this community. I've been falling further and further out of love with Hacker News with all sorts of tech illiterate / science illiterate takes that get lifted to the top. Its getting to the point that I assume any top ranked comment will be demonstrated absolutely wrong in 5 years
it’s very frankly well worth stepping out of the Y Combinator bubble. I dropped the site for anything other than as a target for sneering years ago because I started to see a lot of dangerous patterns emerge in the community (general scientific illiteracy is one thing, as you mentioned; for me, the site’s general undercurrent of thinly veiled racism got very hard to stomach).
on a more personal note, not being immersed in HN’s bad ideas did wonders for my mental health. the only thing I feel I really lost was the ability to easily get an audience for my open source projects, but there are other outlets for that.
yeah similar. I only skim the link source as a semi-aggregator of stuff (because it's where a lot of people will share shit), but even that needs significant filtering.
otherwise a strict policy of Don't Read The Comments
Allow me to sum up my relationship with the orange site with a lightly edited quote of Dennis Ritchie from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook:
Well put.
What kinda projects?
mostly Nix code lately: a flake that turns any desktop into an old Lisp machine, another flake that turns any desktop into a new Lisp machine (a Lisp-based workbench that enables system-wide recursive self-improvement), a module that mostly auto-configures a high performance windows gaming VM with dedicated hardware (one of the non-proton ways to game on Linux), and a flake that implements an efficient technique for templating/static website generation
That stuff is guaranteed karma bait on lobste.rs, just fyi
maybe… mostly I’m looking for non-toxic contributors, since these are all projects that do best with community input
Nix sounds very interesting tbh.
I recommend it! this notawfultech post links to a gentle introduction to Nix if you’d like to give it a try. awful.systems also runs on and is deployed by plain NixOS, mostly because it’s a lot of fun to work with in a way devops almost always isn’t
someone has to pick up the fallen mantle of , RIP
I dare wish for TechTakes to embody its spirit, not in the sense of replicating all of its problematic aspects, but possibly in the sense of using "a hackernews" and to a lesser extent "an internet" as a somewhat (very) derogatory pronoun.
after that Urbit thread of hackernewses incorrecting each other,