Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.

What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.

You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.

Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.

But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.

It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.

This is both good and bad.