Comment by alephnerd

23 days ago

> 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

14 comments

alephnerd

Reply
snowpid  23 days ago

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?

  • kelnos  23 days ago

    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.

    • ncruces  23 days ago

      Sure, but that's 12-18pm CET, which is hardly peak EU work hours.

      So what does "the majority" mean? 51%? Because that's just saying those 51% occur during EU/UK afternoons and east cost mornings.

Avicebron  23 days ago

How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?

  • alephnerd  23 days ago

    > 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.

    • porridgeraisin  22 days ago

      I dont know about the social aspects since I don't live there, but as far as AI goes, it's not just HN. There is no place where you get balanced takes that match the work that we actually do day to day. I suspect part of this is accelerated by the media practices of the hyperscalers like anthropic and openai - they make doomerism super profitable for publishers. One of the most natural emergent counterweights to doomerism is over-skepticism. That is my theory for why it is the way it is. The remaining over-hype is a counterweight to this over-skepticism (I'm not talking about altman hyping his business, I mean the general tech people going around bashing sutton and lecun and mentioning "AGI")

      Even publications, semianalysis is the only major, decent one in my experience (excluding personal blogs).

      Everything is low SNR for AI - have you seen ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS recently?? There is almost no point even going except for meeting people which we do by scheduling talks back and forth every few months anyways.

      I also find IRL, then a carefully curated twitter timeline with the politics toggle on the settings page set to off, are the only ways to get high SNR information about AI.

      I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here.

      2 replies →

    • snowpid  23 days ago

      Pickleball and Hyrox is very common in the DACH region, Hyrox was invented in Hamburg...

      " Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. " Non existent in DACH region or CEE because why should it?

      " 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." I think people with problems are more likely to post and secondly maybe you are convoluting your social circle with the whole SV.

      1 reply →