Comment by greyb
9 hours ago
>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
As someone from the DACH region I very much agree with this. I don't see a shift from typical US opinions to opinions often held in the DACH region. Not at all.
> HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years.
>> HN remains very US-centric
Bay Area != US
The Bay Area is its own microcosm of culture and philosophy that diverges significantly from much of the US.
Not making a statement on how prevalent either are on HN, but Bay Area is very much not equivalent to the US.
As an American, it’s extremely Silicon Valley centric, at least in mindset.
Extremely. The valley/startup lens is absolutely the dominant one.
> I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-, French, and Polish-native speakers are increasingly prominent (eg. periods and spaces instead of commas in numbers, spacing between quotation marks and words, failing to use context clues to infer timezone), and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase.
HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well.
I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?
> How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN
For starters, most Bay Area residents are not active on HN on a sunny Sunday afternoon during peak brunch time, a Giants v Rockies game, a social race in the Marina, during the weekend right before college move-in begins for a number of UCs, and the first weekend after the K-12 school year started.
Secondly, the technical conversations on this HN are somewhat divorced from those which are common now. Firstly, no one cares about system cards or micro-level model changes and performance anymore - the name of the game now is eval, harness development, RL/reward engineering, and model-agnostic development.
Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure.
Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. Everyone here knows a UCLA grad has the exact same opportunties right out of college as a Stanford grad. Most high value careers like startups, PE/VC, big tech, etc recruit from a mix of 20-30 public and private schools that I have listed multiple times on here. And to add to that - "MBAs" as a moniker is nonexistent as most of us who are in decisonmaking roles here in VC, Corporate leadership, and mid-level management are engineers who never did MBAs or any kind of grad school (except our Chinese/Indian peers because of the F1 OPT).
Additonally, most people are levelheaded about AI - they don't deride it as useless but they also don't think it's going to destroy all jobs. On HN you get very black-and-white and highly polarized thinking that AI is only going to lead to X or Y.
And finally, I notice a degree of European anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism that is nonexistent in the real world. I have co-hosted events with EU consulates, helped direct European startups to get American funding, and vice versa, and had pretty personal and unfiltered conversations over drinks with pretty high level Europeans and Americans, and the kind of acrimony you see on here is nonexistent IRL.
Not a single mention of pickleball, hyrox, Kdramas, Yemeni coffee, women's basketball, and other stuff currently in the zeitgeist in the Bay is very telling.
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Haven't seen anyone sending partiful invites here.
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This completely aligns with other analytics I have.
While I appreciated your source 1.) I doubt 99% of Europeans work during 3am - 9am 2.) At least there can be other reasons: 2a.) EU times and African times are basically the same and Africa has a huge population. 2b.) India is closer timewise to EU/African time zones 2c.) What are about posts afterworks?
" RL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase. " Any proof?
I assume the 3am-9am figure was in US Pacific time, in order to emphasize the difference from the working hours of people on the US west coast.
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