off-topic: I though it was called _Hacker_ News because it used to be a hacking oriented board. Apparently it has always been for entrepreneurs, so where does the name come from?
If you read Jessica Livingston's "Founders At Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" published around the same Hacker News came into being, the connection will become clearer. The founders interviewed in the book were (mostly) hackers who created notable products and companies -- it's their stories of how they became entrepreneurs.
Originally it was called "Startup News". PG announced he was making a new site not focused on startups, since that got kind of dull. Instead he changed the name of this site and nothing really changed. My memory is kind of vague, but I believe that is more or less accurate.
Is there a compsci oriented discussion forum with comaparable quality as HN in terms of discussions without the entrepreneurship bias? I would love to know and start following if a such a thing exists.
I still read Slashdot our of habit, but the technical content of the conversation is gone. It's mostly predestriant gripes about technopolitics and copyright/patent/microsoft/apple/google rantng.
reddit has a /compsci that is pretty good, and /programming gets pretty much all the same technical articles hn does without the entrepreneurship ones.
Are there any good subreddits for "patio11-esque" content? Not hard CS, not vc startups, not /r/SEO, but kinda the marketing/small-online-business thing?
LtU is extremely academic -- they expect Ph.D-level discussion in the submissions and comments. Which is wonderful, but mostly inaccessible to non--progrmaming-language-PhDs
From the news submission guidelines -- "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.
The self-identification with the term "hacker" (in the good sense) is pretty strong amongst a lot of people from "those days." The co-option by the media to mean something else was an annoyance, but really hasn't changed that a whole lot.
In other words, it's a personal issue, and nothing to with popularity per-se.
It's like you and a group of childhood friends called yourself "the bucket gang" or something, to the degree that this usage pervaded your personal communications. If suddenly the media started using that term to talk about terrorists or something, you and your friends would probably be annoyed, but it probably wouldn't affect your personal usage, because the connection is already simply too strong; you wouldn't suddenly start using this personal term more often because of the media co-option.
It seems to me that those trying to take it back now aren't the same ones that identified as (good) hackers 30 or so years ago (with a few exceptions I'm sure). The 20-somethings that are fighting for it now are too young to have known the original meaning. They are drawn to the word because of the power it has in our culture. But that power is tied to the negative meaning. It seems disingenuous to argue for its original meaning when the negative meaning is all you've ever known.
