Actually the mix has stayed fairly steady over the years. If anything the technical posts have upticked a bit. Sometimes when this comes up I pick a random date and look in the Internet Archive for the front page that day to see what sort of differences leap out. Maybe I'll do that again.
Yeah this is what attracted me to the site as well - if you look in the wayback for "hackernews.com" you will find a site that was somewhat controversial when it first came out ~99-00. At the time it was, to my knowledge, one of the first public "hacker" WWW sites as compared to locations on underground networks. I also hated it because I had dialup at the time and it took forever to load all those fancy graphics.
