>HN is usually a pretty good gauge for how the wider engineering community feels about a particular technology.
HN is a pretty good gauge for how a subset of a very startup focused portion of the engineering community feels about technology.
I don't know that the same can be said about it reflecting the opinions of the engineering community on the whole, or if the community is even unified enough for anything to be a representative sample. We're a pretty diverse and opinionated lot.
I agree. All I have done for the past 15 years is startups and I love HN, however in the last few years it has become very apparent there is a selection bias to people in startup/valley type tech. I spend a ton of time explaining to my CEO and CTO why a customer cannot just dump that old way and embrace the new hotness. The valley culture is a bubble and does not reflect that of real world IT in general. Still love HN.
I honestly doubt that anyone else in my team of 7 reads HN. There's one guy who might. The rest, it just doesn't seem in their character.
While we might like to think the opposite, I feel like the majority of people in our profession are like the majority of people anywhere -- going to work to work, and going on FB/twitter/reddit to waste time. I don't know many devs personally who take a big interest in the goings-on of the startup world or open-source world in the large. Do they care about spending some of their free time honing their craft or messing around with a new tool? Absolutely. But few seem like the type who would enjoy engaging in a quasi-philosophical discussion on the strengths of various design paradigms. They spend all their day thinking at work; not many want to continue thinking about the same sort of stuff during their off hours.
HN is a pretty good gauge for how a subset of a very startup focused portion of the engineering community feels about technology.
I don't know that the same can be said about it reflecting the opinions of the engineering community on the whole, or if the community is even unified enough for anything to be a representative sample. We're a pretty diverse and opinionated lot.