There are three Jane Street stories on the front page right now. This one, "Socratic Tutor (github.com/janestreet)", and "A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter (bacarella.com)".

What I learned over time is that first, the pool of people who regularly submit to HN is surprisingly small, so if they have interest in a particular set of topics, these topics are overrepresented in the queue; and second, relatively few people patrol new submissions and the the first 3-4 upvotes in the first 15 minutes decide if something bubbles up to the front page or not. These folks often go by keywords / vibes / employer associations, so again, certain topics get an advantage that's unrelated to the merit of the story.

More generally, I think there's been a significant drop in topic diversity on HN over the past year. Almost everything on the front page is related in some way to AI or to companies on the forefront of AI. It's almost as if there's nothing else going on in tech or in the broader world. If you go to some other aggregators, you get a different view.

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efnx 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What are some of the other aggregators?

	▲	uptrails 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The closest to "HN lite" is probably lobste.rs. There's a fair amount of overlap, but it's closer to 20% AI than 80% AI. Reddit? General-interest subreddits such as /r/technology are mostly mainstream news, but there's plenty of specialized ones, such as /r/math, /r/programming, /r/c_programming, /r/rust, etc. Most of these have relatively little AI, some explicitly contain all AI content to weekly threads. Many of the aggregators "killed" by HN are still alive, just not as popular. For example, boingboing.net is up and running. Also, places like Ars Technica have RSS feeds, so it's easy to construct your own, you just lose the social aspect.

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red-iron-pine 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

in other words, someone who works at Jane Street or use to posts on HN a lot