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by alephnerd·2h ago·view on hn ↗
> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes...

HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE.

Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.

The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.

Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.

5 comments
>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?
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?

Non-American here... what is DACH?
It is Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
Thanks! I must admit this is the first time I have heard of the acronym.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland (D, A, CH)
" HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE. "

I like to encounter discussions about German digital health system or the German start up system or neo2. I've never seen them so I doubt it.

Also almost no debates about Polish stuff (Hello neigbours!)

How is it not tech bro centric when every third thread is about some new feature of a random Anthropic product?
the fact that this comment is getting downvoted into oblivion instead of discussed is poignant enough.

fwiw, my experience is similar. hn has not been about startups, vc funding, or anything in that space for quite a while.

to paraphrase a classic, this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.

> this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.

Well, this place (wherever you are) is like a memory of the world we used to love, and the memory is fading... Definitely true too.

You can't expect a place tightly connected to a changing world to stay the same.