I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz

GBU_28@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 1141 points –

Just seems like everything is "this company did this to their employees" and less about "this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons." Or similar

And yes, I could post things, but I'm referring to what hits the top, 12h.

Can anyone rec communities with less of a biz and politics and wfh vs in-office vibe?

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Https://news.ycombinator.com is the gold standard, there are some Lemmy bots following it as well

Wow, it's been a while since I've been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it's filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you'll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.

One of my hats os interviewing senior engineers, one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.

Hacker news is a very, very, common response.

In fact I don't have a better news source to offer you.

I worry about dismissing the discussion as tech bro and businessy... As real engineers use the site, I also worry about dismissing people as tech bros, it's not a great term, and I think unfairly applied to engineers because they are often not neural typical.

one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.

How important is this to you? If they say they don't make an effort to keep up with tech news, is that a red flag? Is your company/product really so much on the cutting edge that you need the team to be keeping up with the latest tech news.

Doesn't seem very important to me, but it's one of the first questions you ask.

its a warm up question, its not a requirement, getting to know you.

But, someone in industry who doesn't make an effort to stay up to date in the industry, somehow, would raise an eyebrow... FWIW nobody has ever not had a answer to that question.

I certainly don't want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they'll ask themselves questions like "Why do we need privacy?" and everyone else in the room will agree that they've never needed it either and then they'll found Google.

I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don't completely miss the ball on what users actually need.

And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.

I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you've ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?

In fact I don't have a better news source to offer you

Have you taken a look at lobste.rs? Not saying it's better, but there are alternatives.

I like hacker news but have had trouble figuring out how to actually like...follow it. There is a shitty Android app. They don't have an RSS feed best I can tell. How does one actually consume it?

Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don't really surface that anymore I guess?

They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.

Maybe that's what it is then. I don't see it on the main page and their FAQ didn't list it either.

Regardless, thanks for the link! I'll drop that into my RSS reader.

They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don’t really surface that anymore I guess?

There's a Firefox addon to fix that. It's called RSSPreview, but besides providing previews it also adds a little button to the address bar on sites that have tags like that so you can find the feeds in the first place.

You could just use !hackernews@derp.foo

I know it's a bot driven community but somehow they actually pulled it off. Lemmy users are actually leaving comments and voting over there.

There's also !hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans but it seems like a less active version of the same thing

I use Harmonic It has a pretty decent ui, but i use web version if i want to search something