> Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?
I don't know if this is an actionable problem, as it depends on the interests of the community, which are, in turn, governed by who they are and what they do. If other types of developers join HN in large numbers, the situation might change, and it will benefit even web-based SV startups, too.
But there's another problem. A few years ago I was working for the defense industry, and hadn't even heard of HN. We were doing distributed, fault tolerant systems with graceful degradation – things that have since become very interesting for "web" (in the wide sense) developers. Obviously, much of the work done there is classified, but even the parts that aren't don't get discussed much because that community hardly blogs at all.
So it's not just a function of what gets submitted or upvoted, but of what "content" (how I loathe that word) is out there, and developers in other industries just don't write of their experience as much (which is a shame because we could all benefit from that). Once in a while we're very lucky to have some technology leak from the often maligned (here on HN) "enterprise". Look how much we've learned from Erlang, that for years was the sole domain of telecom. Or Clojure, which is a result of Rich Hickey's experience in projects that are very far removed from web startups.
I don't know if this is an actionable problem, as it depends on the interests of the community, which are, in turn, governed by who they are and what they do. If other types of developers join HN in large numbers, the situation might change, and it will benefit even web-based SV startups, too.
But there's another problem. A few years ago I was working for the defense industry, and hadn't even heard of HN. We were doing distributed, fault tolerant systems with graceful degradation – things that have since become very interesting for "web" (in the wide sense) developers. Obviously, much of the work done there is classified, but even the parts that aren't don't get discussed much because that community hardly blogs at all.
So it's not just a function of what gets submitted or upvoted, but of what "content" (how I loathe that word) is out there, and developers in other industries just don't write of their experience as much (which is a shame because we could all benefit from that). Once in a while we're very lucky to have some technology leak from the often maligned (here on HN) "enterprise". Look how much we've learned from Erlang, that for years was the sole domain of telecom. Or Clojure, which is a result of Rich Hickey's experience in projects that are very far removed from web startups.