Ok, time for a bit of hand wringing. I said I'd wait a week, but this needs to be pointed out. In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news.
Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.
If you don't allow downvoting of stories then you get this, so you have to ignore some stories. But that's much better than the alternative, which is people banding together to bury certain stories that reach the front page (or before they do, if the karma threshold is above 2).
I don't read reddit, anyway, I guess it takes time to find out what is considered appropiate for the new hacker news. I went by the definition of "is not shown on TV". It's 20 years old, but old articles have been posted before, and I only found it today... If nobody is interested, nobody will mod it up?
Besides, I thought this article also relates to startupping, because of the average work hours aspect. But granted, Jared Diamond is not exactly unknown.
It's not that bad a link... it just seems so drastic a change:-/ It seems also to illustrate that the intersection of interesting startup links is very well defined, whereas the intersection of interesting 'hacker news' is rather less well defined, and will probably be more prone to disagreement, even if the people posting are the same ones as with the old yc.news, because our interests and beliefs are likely to be quite varied.
Add to that people who didn't see or take part in the original, and while I hope the change will go ok, it will be a lot of work.
Obviously hackers have found this interesting, but I agree it is on the border of being irrelevant. I think it is useful to use PG's rule of thumb that if it's covered on TV news then it's off topic which I think this is an exception to.
I like this new direction that yc is taking, the site was rather boring to me before which I barely frequented until I saw that it changed on reddit.
I shouldn't come here to often because each time I read something by PG I feel like quitting my job and starting a company.
The filtering by the wise guardians probably hasn't yet kicked in, either ;-) Time will tell if the filter mechanism will help to move hacker news into a specific (desired) direction.
"In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news."
I love reddit, but I loved the old yc news also. I don't understand how this happens. PG says we're changing focus and all of a sudden people start linking and upvoting different stories??
How is this more interesting to hackers than startup news. I don't understand how a rather top-down decree has changed the output of a definitively democratic system.
http://reddit.com/info/3895/comments
Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.
Harumph.