Every time I see an article linked to HN, the conversations that follow are absolutely horrendous. It makes racism on places like Reddit look tame. There's also a lot of bootlicking for US imperialism, attempting to justify neocolonial ventures or trying to argue about how somehow Taiwan and Japan are "beacons" of the free world...by complaining that China is heading lightspeed towards "renewables and mass electrification." In fact, that's all I can take away from HN conversations, "China le bad" takes, such as "China is irredentist for wanting to reclaim Taiwan," as if someone couldn't make bad faith arguments about civil wars in other countries (setting aside settler-colonialism, I'm sure that the US wouldn't have wanted a "free the confederacy" movement, but who knows maybe that's what tech bros want?). There's always this whole theme in their discussions portraying China as some "uncivilized" nation contrasted to the "civilized" western nations, and it's always this uniquely disgusting and ignorant quality which reflects the thinly veiled white supremacy in supposedly liberal ideology.
Hacker News (news dot ycombinator dot com)
Are they popular, I have never heard of them
Very, they show up as a source of discussion for a lot of "tech news" sites, they often get linked on Twitter, Reddit, etc.