[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spen...
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Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on
HN?
For a few weeks, I am doubting if HN is another "user engagement"
place like you know Reddit, FB etc. It seems a waste of times (to
me) as I don't see any tangible benefits I am getting out of it.
So I would like to know if any of you have such experiences. I am
specifically looking for stories like: 1) I posted this project and
I started some company. Sold it or earning a lot of money or living
my dream 2) I was hired because of my post on HN. 3) Girls chasing
you because of your reputation as HN or met your wife because of
your cool project ( Please don't hate me for this) Basically
money, power etc.. Forgive me for being blunt but I am not looking
for "10-sec fame". I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the
website. Good. But just for one day. Also, I am not sure blogging
count as a tangible benefit unless it is paid service. I hope you
understand my point. Also intellectual debate, I get more
information, I feel smart as benefits etc. don't count in this
context.
Author : ElectricMind
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-03-06 10:37 UTC (12 hours ago)
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Back when there were a lot of Ruby, Rails and CSS posts, I used
| the knowledge from those and the comments to change careers and
| it's been a good move for me.
|
| I recommend the Hacker Newsletter if you are busy and just want
| to know the big stories posted. It's a quality curation and the
| writer takes suggestions from his subscribers.
| phtrivier wrote:
| HN is very addictive. IT made me aware of some interesting
| authors. (Waitbuwhy, for example.) Also, I got my current job
| through the "who's hiring".
|
| But, its usage definitely has to be managed. It's on my
| leechblock list for 9-5.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Not HN, but I'm #32 on electronics.stackexchange.com, the top
| 0.5%. I did get something concrete out of this: they sent me a
| free tshirt with the site logo on.
|
| I'm #24 on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ) and am
| proud to report that this has got me absolutely nothing tangible.
|
| I did consider trying to turn my most upvoted comments into a
| book, since I've probably already written 50-100k words here, all
| they need is a little editing, right?
| elcomet wrote:
| Would you say what drives you to write so much on those sites ?
| toast0 wrote:
| I've only got 1/3rd the HN Internet Points. But I write a lot
| of comments here.
|
| I feel like a lot of people actually read the comments here,
| and consider them, and may change their mind. I've seen
| enough conversations where someone says something, another
| person argues something different, and the first person
| agrees and thanks; and ocassionally, I see that person
| bringing it up with the new state of mind in future threads.
|
| So, while "someone on the internet is wrong, I must correct
| them" is generally a fruitless endeavor, it seems somewhat
| fruitful here. I get good vibes from helping other people in
| that way.
|
| Also, I am sometimes corrected and I get good vibes from
| learning new things. Ocassionally, you can rant about
| something related and say it doesn't make sense or isn't
| documented, and someone will point you at the documentation.
|
| Do I spend too much time here? Probably. But it's a better
| time suck than many other places. I try to stay out of the
| political threads, although not always successfully (rule of
| thumb, it it's 100+ posts and not connected to my technical
| experience, don't click, or if you do click, just skim for
| current events knowledge)
|
| Also: HN loads fast almost always, and has the best chance of
| loading in poor conditions compared to anyother site I might
| want to look at.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I found my current and my previous job through it, and I've been
| extremely happy in both places. So... almost five years of
| employment by now I guess?
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| When I was freelancing I got a couple of gigs by talking to
| companies who listed themselves here.
|
| Very recently I achieved a significant boost in production system
| perf from comments here about the underlying hardware of GCP at
| different custom assignments. This saved decent $$ at a small
| company.
|
| I've used HN twice now to cash in on the rise of BTC
| (unfortunately my liquid capital is low enough that this is only
| low 5 digit gain).
|
| And you say information doesn't count, but filtering through the
| information and analysis here is a high signal way to "get
| ahead". To acquire power at work and amongst friends it helps to
| be both insightful and reliable, as well as confident. While HN
| doesn't make me reliable it sure as hell helps on the other
| fronts.
| Antoninus wrote:
| You get to see what the average developer thinks.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I am here to learn about investment opportunities.
| cyberlab wrote:
| > I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But
| just for one day.
|
| I've noticed that some submissions are these single-serving-
| sites[0] that eventually become memes that people re-share for
| eternity, so the 'one day' sentiment isn't always true. A site
| can become part of Internet culture pretty quickly, and continue
| to get high-vol traffic for some time. One notable example is
| this gem: https://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/
|
| I share this in business meetings to communicate decent design
| principles, despite the NSFW title, and continue to share it on
| social media, forever surfacing it to remind people about the
| 'lean web' / non-obese web. The stats for the site would be
| interesting to look at.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I get exposed to a broader swath of what people smarter than me
| care about, I also get to dive deeper on topics I enjoy. HN has
| been a wonderful addition to my life.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| I became a Software Engineer (my childhood dream) by reading
| edw519 (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edw519) comments and
| free PDF book. He wrote that you don't need a university degree
| to start in the field, so I jumped out of bed and started
| learning Python. Now 8 years later I'm a Senior Software
| Engineer.
|
| I even was in a CTO position once, which didn't work out, because
| I arrived too late and the startup would have gone bankrupt
| anyway, but I enjoyed that the most.
|
| I learned a lot about Python and generic programming related
| things from the articles posted here. I read 1 article/day on
| average for years now.
| randcraw wrote:
| I think your answer begins with the site's full name: Hacker
| _News_ Network (HNN). It 's not about hacking, per se. It's about
| aggregating news and tech articles and occasional solicitations
| from YC's startups that are likely of interest to developers and
| other tech folk, originally those in the San Francisco area
| startup community where its owner YCombinator (YC) is based (a
| startup incubator).
|
| I think HNN's original intent was to help startup staff to make
| connections with potential partners and domain subject matter
| experts (which can be difficult if you're new to an industry, as
| many at startups are). In time, the site has evolved, broadening
| its agenda and its geography as its participants grew and
| diversified.
|
| The conversations that ensue are echoes of participants who have
| trod the path described in each article, or more typically, have
| insights or opinions. If you find that amusing or edifying,
| you'll stay. If you don't, you'll leave. Apparently you don't.
| enko123 wrote:
| Invested in and made a fortune off Nvidia after reading various
| comments. Similarly Sold Tesla near the peak based on comments
| here.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| > Basically money, power etc..
|
| None of those, personally. I'm sure that some people have
| benefited by finding business ideas and opportunities or new jobs
| but there are other ways to do this and it's hardly a good reason
| to spend time on HN.
|
| > Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart
| as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
|
| The largest benefit for me is being exposed to a mix of
| interesting ideas and being part of a corner of the internet
| that's quite a bit more civil. The effects that this has over the
| long run might be positive but they are also difficult to
| quantify.
|
| It's okay (and healthy) to do things that can't be assigned a
| specific monetary value.
| gpm wrote:
| One year during university my summer job fell through at the last
| second. I emailed 3 people who had posted on who is hiring asking
| if they'd be interesting in hiring an intern. I got an interview
| within 24 hours, scheduled under 24 hours later, and I was hired
| in the interview (at a big company too). In the interview they
| asked me how much money I wanted, and apparently I named a number
| that was too low because they paid me more than I asked for.
| pram wrote:
| It literally got me a couple hundred bucks in some crypto from
| Keybase, just for having an HN account. Thats more than I can say
| for any other site lol
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| The learning alone is worth it. I think very few things in my
| career have been as formative as this site.
|
| Interesting bug troubleshooting articles, learning about new tech
| being released, learning about new zero days, seeing people post
| their work or see new ycombinator companies inspires me. I'm also
| able to see when AWS is down or Google shuts down one of it's
| apps before anyone else. All around good stuff.
| maximente wrote:
| i consider all tech - all forums, social media, etc. - to be
| similar to a special forces group (or pick your favorite non-
| violent elite group). it's best deployed with a clear objective
| in mind - learn more about Haskell from gurus, see how S.V. is
| reacting to tech workers/wages changing, get a job or work from
| monthly threads - until either the effort is a success, more
| time/energy can/should be brought to bear, or it can be easily
| aborted without much fanfare.
|
| so, what do you want? if it's to network, connect, learn, debate,
| get a new job - do that, and avoid the addictive type stuff like
| refreshing every 10 mins, etc. if it's to avoid boredom, well...
| tread carefully.
| smitty1e wrote:
| On an internet with a generally lousy signal-to-noise ratio, HN
| generally affords useful tech pointers.
|
| It's what Slashdot was a couple decades back.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I'm a old fogey who's on HN since 2007, and HN is one of the rare
| forums that has helped me in my career. I lurked a lot during
| early years but the value I got from it was immense. I honed my
| craft of software engineering just by being here and randomly
| discovering Nuggets of wisdom. HN is a treasure trove if you know
| how to find it. The olden comments are especially golden.
|
| Edit: the best feature of HN is the absence of notifications when
| someone comments on your comments and absence of an award system.
| This removes the Karmafication of the interaction
| vinliao wrote:
| I think the benefit of HN, reddit, or twitter is the random once-
| in-a-bluemoon jackpot you get with it. Sure, most of the post
| here are meh, but sometimes there's one that grabs you and alters
| your life. Perhaps all the okay-ish posts are the price you and I
| pay to get exposed to the once-in-a-bluemoon jackpot.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| The value of HN, to me, can be summed up by one quote from Noam
| Chomsky:
|
| > There also just is a need in the media to present a tolerably
| accurate picture of the world... for example, take the Wall
| Street Journal, the prototypical business press: the editorial
| pages are just comical tantrums, but the news coverage is often
| quite interesting and well done... people in the business world
| have to have a realistic picture of what's happening in the world
| if they're going to make sane decisions about their money.
|
| I'm not saying Hacker News is the WSJ of tech, but the reason I
| read HN is because it presents the most holistically accurate
| picture of the tech world that I've seen. Top comments are
| frequently people with a deep, first-person understanding of any
| given story - usually better than the linked story itself. Having
| that kind of understanding of the world available in your phone's
| browser is simply invaluable in making well-informed long-term
| decisions about your career, skill development, and money.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Of my ~600 markdown notes, 85 currently contain the string
| "news.yco". Some of them may be just feel-good pseudo-
| procrastination (inspiration for the blog I did not start yet)
| but others definitely shaped me as a person. A big percentage is
| relevant material for my main side-project - the note taking app
| for my note - for which I got the idea and various details from
| HN. Another is a bunch of good (and less good) books I found here
| and read.
|
| I don't have a collection of Teslas and some bay area real estate
| to show for it _yet_ , but it comes down to this: My day-to-day
| thoughts are massively shaped by the media I consume. I can spend
| all day contemplating some dumb /r/askreddit question or a novel
| take on Docker CI/CD I read on HN. I am pretty sure the second
| one aligns more to whatever the opposite of opportunity cost is.
| IMO, in the end, being knowledgeable makes you a better dev.
|
| Also, I am practicing my English writing skill, so if I start
| this blog one day, maybe it will not even suck (and earn me all
| that tangible money, of course ;) ).
| staysaasy wrote:
| HN is the only public place I've found that has well beyond a
| critical mass of people who have started, owned, operated, or
| worked at very strong startups and technology companies. When the
| media is out of touch on a topic, HN will often be right on the
| money. And HN has a lot of good ideas on management and business
| strategy if you're down to dig for it.
|
| As a result if you want to read the ideas of or get your ideas in
| front of people who are actually in the arena of modern tech
| companies (with a definite SV / American / western european / VC
| backed startup slant), this is the best place I've seen.
|
| HN also has the most "real talk" about startup equity value that
| I've ever seen, although I think that the HN POV on equity is
| broadly more negative than it should be.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| The thing to realize about HN, social media more broadly, and
| life in general, is that there is always much more noise than
| signal, but there are also always nuggets of extremely valuable
| signal mixed in at random with the noise.
|
| If you want to discover the signal, you can't hate the noise.
| Understand that noise may even be a generator of signal. Embrace
| it, explore it, and harvest the signal from it.
|
| As such, a few things I've learned on HN have positively impacted
| my career in a major way and sent me down a career path I may not
| have discovered otherwise. Namely functional programming, formal
| methods, and PLT (to which I wasn't exposed in school). I've also
| met people here I've later collaborated with IRL.
|
| The name of the game is figuring out which noise is more likely
| to generate the most valuable signal for you. For example, if
| you're a programmer, then the noise of celebrity Twitter is going
| to generate much less signal for you than HN, programming
| Reddits, or similar.
|
| Be strategic about where you spend your time, but also be
| forgiving of the noise. It's part of the process.
| dnautics wrote:
| took out puts on intel twice on bad news about their processors.
| Made a ton of money, though the second one was an accident. The
| bad news went unnoticed but i was still sitting on the position a
| week later when it was announced the CEO was fired for diddling
| his underling; and then the stock tanked 30%.
|
| The market can become irrational in time to put $ into dnautics'
| pocket (this sort of thing has happened to me more than a few
| times now).
| hooande wrote:
| This question is silly. You can find business opportunities, jobs
| and romantic partners by pure chance in any social situation. If
| you're trying to find "tangible benefits" by asking people "did
| you find them by hanging out here?", you're doing it wrong.
|
| The people here are intelligent and have widely varied
| experience. They discuss topics that are of interest to me, with
| minimal BS. That's it. That's the benefit
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| And this kind of cherry-picked reply-replies is why I'm happy
| that some people hate HN. Let them find a different place to
| misunderstand comments and focus on something irrelevant :)
| Then the rest of us can assume the best of the people we
| discuss with.
| [deleted]
| linkdd wrote:
| I feel more and more than HN comments is not for every one
| and not for me. If you're not careful with your wording,
| you'll get flagged and your message will be dismissed and
| it seems futile to argue against it.
|
| This creates an "elitist" atmosphere (totally subjective
| assertion) that I'm not comfortable with.
|
| Your comment is the perfect example of that.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with you, I also sometimes feel that some
| comments get unfairly flagged and then trying to argue
| your opinion to be futile.
|
| But I also think that not every place on the internet is
| for everyone. I for one feel that the Twitter atmosphere
| is not comfortable, but I can imagine how other people do
| think so. So I try to stay away from Twitter.
|
| Not all places invite all groups of people on the planet.
| I like to discuss with different-minded people, people
| who think different from me, so I like to talk with
| people against sexualisation, against drugs, people who
| are generally more conservative than me, to understand
| their perspectives. But it's really hard to do that on
| Twitter, as those people don't feel comfortable there,
| and that's fine to me. I'll find them where they are
| comfortable, and then I either adjust myself to the
| community I'm joining, or I find a different place.
|
| Different and divergent communities on the internet is a
| good thing, it gives us multiple different ideas at the
| same time.
| linkdd wrote:
| Every social place has its own "traditions" if I dare use
| this term.
|
| Twitter is not really a place for debate (more for rants
| IMHO), but HN is. And not every one wants to debate and
| that's cool.
|
| What I enjoy the most on HN is the often insightful
| content (based on years of experience), but many threads
| bring "hype wars" or some kind of tech-related drama,
| what I remember the most is: - C/C++ is
| evil, every one should do Rust - Kubernetes is evil
| because it's complex - Your business is failing if
| it's not generating 100k MRR
|
| I do not even bother anymore to argue against that.
|
| NB: I exaggerated intentionally to make my point, I know
| there is more nuanced opinions, and some real/justified
| concerns about those topics.
|
| IMHO, While HN is a "social place" (there are people who
| can talk), this is not a "social network" (I will
| probably never remember your nickname even if we talk
| again together in another thread).
| isatty wrote:
| On the first glance the "this question is silly" seems snarky
| and stackoverflow/HNesque but I agree with you. This is one of
| the few posts that deserves this reply.
| amelius wrote:
| Cognitive bias is a weak point of HN, which is the reason why
| posts like "how I made 1 million selling cheap stuff" are
| always likely to be on the front page.
|
| It's also the reason why founders have an enormous working
| drive, most of them fail, while VCs of course are the ones
| laughing their way to the bank.
| gumby wrote:
| I read articles I enjoy and comments that are sometimes really
| interesting. That is the sum of he refit to me and more than
| worth it.
| icey wrote:
| I signed up for HN 14 years ago yesterday (whoa!).
|
| The biggest thing I've gotten out of it over the past 14 years is
| meeting a lot of interesting people working on cool gear. People
| who I wouldn't have known about at all otherwise.
|
| The second biggest thing is exposure to all those cool projects.
| I love new programming languages and this has been the most
| reliable place to learn about them. Almost never from an
| announcement, but from the early users of those languages trying
| to convince everyone to join them.
|
| I don't spend nearly as much time as I used to here, but there
| was one other intangible benefit early on -- HN helped me be more
| precise in my written communications. Not really knowing anyone
| here but wanting to contribute forced me to think through the
| things that I was saying much more than hanging out on irc or
| Slashdot.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| As with many tools, it mostly depends on how you use it, assuming
| that there is something of value for you to start with.
|
| Let me give you a few examples to illustrate:
|
| - Reddit: mostly a waste of time for me; I rarely found anything
| of great interest; however, "killing time" sometimes is useful
| for me, even though I should find better ways to do so (e.g. take
| a 10 minutes walk, instead of spending 10 minutes of reddit
| browsing)
|
| - Facebook: I rarely use it, because it's not only a waste of
| time, it's also a place where I see the worst part of my friends
| being shown. A lot of selfies, a lot of "let me show you how cool
| / rich / hot / lucky I am", even for people that I know aren't
| like that in real life.
|
| I also recognize it as such, because at the beginning (8-10 years
| ago), I used Facebook that way. I used it to post pictures from
| exotic places I visited for work, diagrams of the globe with my
| numerous flights, etc. (at the time I was flying 100+ times a
| year, I had a very cool job (tech evangelist for AWS for a large
| chunk of the world), and I visited tens of different countries
| and cities each year)
|
| - Hacker News, on the other hand, has mostly great content. I
| have been spending time here almost every day for the past 10+
| years, and I pretty much don't regret any of it. To the contrary:
| me being extremely curious, I found a ton of relief in being able
| to read stuff not just related to work / software / IT, but also
| about other "geek" / "nerdy" things. I've learned so much. I even
| got to "know" a couple of dozen frequent posters, and with some
| of them we exchanged emails every once in a while.
|
| But in addition to the links themselves, I think it's really
| valuable to read comments and participate. I think that the
| moderators (@dang, etc) have done an incredible job in keeping
| this place mostly civilized and high quality.
|
| I don't think it's for everybody; and your experience might be
| different. But perhaps you should give it a proper try before
| giving up on it.
|
| Hope this helps.
| soneca wrote:
| I got a few interviews after posting on "Who wants to be hired?"
| and got a job after a post on "Who is hiring?".
|
| I know a friend who got a job offer from Square and Google after
| one of his blog posts (very deep, technical, explaining a new
| thing he discovered about the tracking of a famous app). He is
| not even very active on HN, just one hit post.
|
| But, it seems to me that you are being very superficial about how
| you define tangible and not very open to get value from HN
| outside of a very direct path with obvious causality to power and
| money. So it will be a lottery with low chances of winning, thus
| I would advise you to get out of it. It will be a waste of time
| for you because of your way of seeing things.
| hvmonk wrote:
| Nothing!
| xyzzy4 wrote:
| I learned about Bitcoin from HN in 2011.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Like many others, I launched my startup here, and yes we got tons
| of traffic that week. There is another benefit, which is the
| validation that comes with having been at the top of HN.
|
| It is very powerful to be able to say: "my Show HN post was at #1
| for over 12 hours". [1] It tells potential funders/partners that
| your idea is very popular in a community that they respect.
|
| I have also found a couple important partners through HN. In
| December, I was deep in a thread when I saw a comment mentioning
| an extensible iOS browser that a YC company was soon to launch.
| [2] I reached out and they're now one of our partners. Ditto for
| a popular podcast website. [3]
|
| HN has a lot of visitors who are willing to embrace new things,
| and who are fast-moving. This can be very valuable if you're
| looking for early adopters and partners.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
|
| 2: https://www.insightbrowser.com
|
| 3: https://programaudioseries.com
| [deleted]
| magicroot75 wrote:
| This question is flawed. It's like asking if attending cocktail
| parties has practically benefitted oneself. Or walks around the
| neighborhood. Or playing video games. The experience of life and
| information is more complex than a probabilistic return of
| 'practical' value.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I use it to learn about the type of people I'm dealing with in
| the Tech Industry, and how they speak and act when they're peudo-
| anonymous.
| Impossible wrote:
| Blind is better for this than HN, but HN is pretty good,
| especially with the rise in throwaway accounts. I think this is
| because HN is more diverse, and Blind by it's nature is
| employees at your company and other big tech companies.
| boatsie wrote:
| In some ways, it's what's not here that brings me here. Other
| sites are filled with ads, hate, click bait, images, videos,
| trackers, etc. When you need to kill 10 minutes waiting in line,
| the efficiency of what you can learn here is unmatched.
| Itsdijital wrote:
| It still has the "social news site" vibe of the mid 00's.
| soulchild37 wrote:
| Its not as straightforward, but I would never would have thought
| making my own apps / SaaS to make a living (instead of working
| for an employer) if I didn't lurk at HN previously.
|
| By lurking at HN, I stumbled across patio11, tptacek, amyhoy,
| pieter levels, and several other small indie devs sharing their
| experience, and encouragement.
|
| My apps/ SaaS income are still laughable compared to my salary,
| but I think it will grow as time goes.
| cuddlecake wrote:
| Every now and then I find a link or a mention in the comments
| about literature or information regarding a topic I find
| interesting.
|
| Lately, I learned about CSS stack contexts because of a blog post
| here, and read other posts by the same author. Learned a lot
| about CSS that day.
| whateveracct wrote:
| i love to bookmark HN threads instead of articles sometimes.
| especially for technical stuff. the commments usually have a lot
| of good discussion and related links.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Not everything needs to have tangible benefits, it's just
| entertainment.
|
| I don't see how you can compare it to sites that monetize user
| engagement though, since there is no monetization at all here.
| aasasd wrote:
| Not tangible I guess, but HN gave me rest from Reddit's stupidity
| and incivility. I do want _some_ social web-hangout, and migrated
| from one place to another--and while Reddit is (or was) better
| than what we have in my country, it 's overrun by teens and tends
| to bring out the worst in them. HN has its share of dumb
| crowdthink, but the contrast with Reddit is illuminating, so that
| now I notice when I begin to act or think like people on Reddit
| do.
|
| After this, going back to local sites where anger, trolling and
| fool-playing are just normal adult behavior, is outright painful.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| There are some good subreddits out there. r/experienceddevs
| springs to mind
| agumonkey wrote:
| I scan Reddit wide but this sub I didn't know
| NathanielK wrote:
| I enjoy Reddit, but it's just not designed for smaller
| communities in my opinion.
|
| The tricky thing with reddit is that it's algorithm tuned for
| a daily churn. A small sub, like the one you mentioned, may
| only have a couple good posts a week, but you will miss them
| if you don't check every day.
|
| If you only browse the frontpage of your subscribed
| subreddits, adding any popular subreddits tend to drown out
| the smaller ones.
| yamrzou wrote:
| r/AskHistorians and r/AskAnthropology come to mind as well.
| capableweb wrote:
| I agree with others, especially graeme's idea of HN as "a slot
| machine with positive expected value". I get ton of new ideas and
| ways to approach things by reading through the comments after
| getting my own view of an article. Just that is enough for me to
| think I get more value from HN than the time I spend on it.
|
| One concrete thing I've managed to do is earn a lot of money on
| reading and understanding the sentiment of users who know more
| than me. The concrete scenario is around AMD as a stock, which I
| invested in late September 2019, only based on reading and trying
| to understand users and why users here prefer AMD rather than
| Intel for most common tasks.
| superasn wrote:
| I was cured of a decade long chronic pain by reading a comment on
| Hacker news about TMS and Dr.John Sarno. Then a few people who
| read my comment also commented the same happened to them as they
| too had been cured of debilitating illness and chronic pains (one
| HNer said he was contemplating suicide because how bad his pains
| were but was cured just reading about it in the book).
|
| I generally don't like to post about it anymore but since you
| want to know if HN got you money, power, etc. All I can say is
| reading HN got me my health and life back.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I have never been hired because of a post of mine on HN. But I
| have been hired twice by noting posts of the form "we're hiring
| based on this challenge, go check it out".
|
| In both cases the challenge was apparently challenging enough
| that the company actually meant "we hire based on this
| challenge". Sadly, an overwhelming majority of hiring
| "challenges" are so easy that the company feels the need to
| impose a full conventional hiring process behind it.
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| There are once in a while priceless comments about things like
| career growth, trends (technological, economical) or just new
| products.
|
| Also some technical tidbits here and there, especially on the
| practical side, the knowledge "on the streets", exchange
| experiences, niche companies that are only starting but might
| solve a problem you have (or might have)
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I think one huge benefit is because downvoting is limited in some
| cases it allows for a much better dialogue.
| toto444 wrote:
| > Forgive me for being blunt but I am not looking for "10-sec
| fame". I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good.
| But just for one day.
|
| I was lucky to once get my 10-sec-fame on HN. I don't know how
| much traffic it represented because my site does not have any
| analytics. However what I I do is very niche and there is not
| many places on the internet where people will show interest in my
| work. HN is one of these, I got some high quality comments which
| I personally think is a tangible benefit.
| leeuw01 wrote:
| It made me realise that the formal methods part of my CS master,
| altough quite niche, can generate a lot of value if aplied
| correctly. This lead to my first R&D job.
| pinouchon wrote:
| Posted a comment on this thread,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26321793, then had people
| contact me and had very good conversations as a result.
|
| Also, I met my co-founder on reddit/r/algotrading and it was a
| total game-changer for me (reddit is not HN, but similar)
| intrasight wrote:
| An example. I just read this and enjoyed it very much.
|
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5359
|
| Certainly would not have come across that except for HN.
|
| On HN, I find interesting articles with the added benefit of
| thoughtful conversation about said article.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Here i learn about interesting new tech that isn't (yet) widely
| known. That's more than enough for me.
| roninhacker wrote:
| Four jobs.
| cbanek wrote:
| I'm not sure if this counts as #2, but I've hired a number of
| good people on HN via the monthly job postings. It's a good
| community, and not even just people who blog.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| The main benefit I get from HN is some level of knowledge about
| newer technologies and what people are thinking about them. My
| day job is not very innovative so it's really easy to fall way
| behind in knowledge. From reading HN comments i can see what
| other people are thinking about things and see what's fashionable
| right now.
|
| This helps me at my day job to take a lead in getting our systems
| more up to date
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| Sounds like HN is a waste of time for you and your goals.
| XCSme wrote:
| My Show HN[0] got to the front-page and I received amazing
| feedback from HN users. I also made several sales from that post
| and I received an outstanding exit offer (I didn't accept it).
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746921
| JakeStone wrote:
| Sure.
|
| I hit your (2) criteria a while back.
|
| In general though, for me, it's a case of finding out additional
| tech/science things I wasn't aware about and reading what are
| generally informed opinions about said things. Sometimes I get to
| be one of those informed opinions.
|
| That became useful to me when I ran across a post about H3
| spatial partitioning. I actually had a use case that I'd been
| working on using DGGRID for a few months, and that was turning
| out to be computationally expensive, and I couldn't make it work
| in near real time for my specific use.
|
| This in turn led me to developing a project I've been working on
| for a while that has expanded my skill set in a handful of
| disciplines, and if I hadn't run across H3, I'd probably have
| thrown away my project as a lost cause.
| higerordermap wrote:
| Got interested in compilers & Programming languages. Also variety
| of other CS topics. (The links and few top comments are very
| good).
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| Most recently, a job.
|
| And not just any gig. I'm working with a small business that
| makes awesome products while staying very efficient from an biz
| ops perspective. It's great to make an impact and share success
| with a likeminded team. It's fun working with physical products
| again too and I'm learning so much indie e-commerce.
|
| Shoutout to Chad and BoardGameTables.com
| trashme wrote:
| > For a few weeks, I am doubting if HN is another "user
| engagement" place like you know Reddit, FB etc.
|
| If you cannot engage an audience, people don't crowd around to
| hear you.
|
| HN is a place where people come to showcase what they create,
| share something that good hackers would find interesting, and
| comment on others' submissions.
|
| As you may know, visitors to the site are wide-ranging in
| background and interests. Here I would restrict my reading to
| what suits my tastes since I am not a polymath and comment on
| topics which I am knowledgeable or want to learn more about.
| mFixman wrote:
| HN is boring.
|
| Even if it has no tangible benefit, I'm at a lower risk of l
| wasting a lot of time here than in Reddit or most other social
| media sites.
| altrunox wrote:
| > 2) I was hired because of my post on HN.
|
| Well, not really, BUT, I go some thousand of views on my blog,
| and I never reached the front page. While it's not really money,
| it's marketing...
|
| But I would say you could get hired, I posted in a specific
| reddit community last year I got an interview opportunity due to
| my post.
|
| But I'm mostly here to get some new information and read some
| different perspectives of stuff in general, not only IT related.
|
| And about IT stuff, I've found books and information that I
| probably would never by other means, which, by itself, could help
| me do better at work, interviews and so on.
|
| I check the front-page almost daily at my lunch break.
|
| ----------
|
| EDIT: I just remembered that someone also approached me due to
| sharing a post here, that they were hiring.
|
| I didn't move forward because I just started a new job, so yeah,
| you can get hired.
| anonleb4 wrote:
| For me, HN gives a sort of window into the American SF techno
| views and mindset about the world. It's quite interesting to read
| their ideas and opinions. It's a bubble like other places but it
| doesn't mean you won't learn something.
| hnnoob wrote:
| the tech universe is too vast, HN provides a perspective in a
| world where you can aim and shoot for 10,000 years.
| rc-1140 wrote:
| Curated information discovery and sharing that I genuinely cannot
| get anywhere else in a public manner - maybe Lobsters is a
| competitor, but that's focused exclusively on software
| development. I have more than a handful of articles and comments
| favorited here that have helped me either help others or help
| myself either professionally or recreationally; they've directed
| me to create personal projects, given me conversation topics,
| helped me get the most out of interviews with companies, identify
| social habits and trends.
|
| There's a lot of noise in regards to the signal-to-noise ratio,
| and I have my own biases and petty views (i.e., it's common for
| users to post articles from people I dislike sharing the same
| industry with), but there's simply so much to open yourself up to
| in terms of even reading the comments for a submission I flat-out
| dislike or otherwise don't particularly care for.
|
| There haven't been any miracles on this website in terms of
| feeling part of a unified community or experiencing random bouts
| of generosity in person-to-person interactions, but I consider
| spending time on HN so valuable that I'd willingly pay a
| membership fee to preserve some kind of member standard like
| SomethingAwful hoped to do with the "10bux" membership fee
| (paying $10 to access the site's forums).
| ggambetta wrote:
| HN helped publisher No Starch Press discover my online book
| Computer Graphics From Scratch [0], which led to its publication
| as a real book [1]. Shared more of the story in the most recent
| post about it [2].
|
| [0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch
|
| [1] https://nostarch.com/computer-graphics-scratch
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26017086
| mv4 wrote:
| Got a new career from one of the "who is hiring" posts.
| tylermac1 wrote:
| I found my current job on here. It was on a Who's Hiring post
| awhile ago. One of the better things to happen to me and my
| family in years.
| armonraphiel wrote:
| I grew up believing SWE was something I couldn't do after a very
| abrasive C++ course I took in my youth. It took a few years but
| the content posted here directly contributed to me pushing past
| those fears.
| Mc91 wrote:
| For me it is #2. I posted my resume on a looking for work thread
| and got a contract at good pay and some money I needed at the
| time.
|
| There have been other threads on HN that helped to put some money
| in my pocket, but that put the most in.
| Bakary wrote:
| >So I would like to know if any of you have such experiences. I
| am specifically looking for stories like: 1) I posted this
| project and I started some company. Sold it or earning a lot of
| money or living my dream 2) I was hired because of my post on HN.
| 3) Girls chasing you because of your reputation as HN or met your
| wife because of your cool project ( Please don't hate me for
| this)
|
| This is a cargo-cult understanding of these sorts of places. The
| sort of things you describe come as a result of random social
| interactions that could take place anywhere, and are more linked
| to your personal characteristics than the environment itself.
| It's true however than HN can be a good environment for some of
| that as all sorts of people gravitate to it. But it's silly to
| reason along the lines of 1. Successful tech people go there 2. I
| will go there too 3. ??? 4. Profit. Technically, it can work but
| it will only work based on what you put into it along with random
| chance, it will not work through magical osmosis.
|
| >Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart
| as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
|
| I've changed multiple aspects of my lifestyle thanks to HN,
| although it would be hard to reverse engineer that process and
| find which post changed what. It has also been a font of
| inspiration for my creative pursuits. I consider both of these
| things to be big tangible benefits
|
| If you are worried about "optimizing" your time, just scan
| through the posts one half-hour per week to check if there's any
| topic that catches your eye. But yeah, the obvious solution is
| sometimes the best one: if you want a successful company you'd
| better be working on such a project. If you want a good job HN
| can help but you're better off systematically applying and
| networking. If you want women, you'd better be out there talking
| to them. I'd say that for that last part, the "I should get X
| achievement so [relationship/sex] pops out like with a vending
| machine" type of thinking is both dangerous and surprisingly
| counter-productive.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| After reading a lot of health/fitness posts here about 12 months
| ago, I decided to start exercising more and I went from drinking
| 1 alcoholic beverage every other day to 0.
|
| Health is more important than money or power.
|
| Thank you, HN.
| antihero wrote:
| It's the reason I discovered React and a bunch of other tech so
| my current career is in part due to it :)
| hnarn wrote:
| The signal to noise ratio for posted content is way better than
| most similar sites, and the comments are usually informative
| although they've become slightly more opinionated and polemic
| over the years -- but even so my trust in the "right" comments
| rising to the top is much higher here, so the community
| moderation still works well.
|
| There's also some ridiculously smart people here, so reading
| comments tends to make you smarter more often than they make you
| want to go to bed early, which is saying something these days.
| lioeters wrote:
| If you're looking for money, fame, or love - so-called "tangible
| benefits" - you're in the wrong place.
|
| It's a stimulating way to spend some reading time, with
| intellectual debate, tech news, snippets of insider information
| from those in-the-know.. Plenty of fluff but occasional and
| consistent inspiration and thoughts from genuine people deep in
| their niche domains.
| mctt wrote:
| For a start I use https://hckrnews.com set to Top 20%.
|
| This opens to Hews for Hacker News.
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leavjenn.h...
|
| I'm really here for the comments. I like how people think here.
|
| They are presented with a story, they analyse it, offer
| considerable effort and insight.
|
| That effort comes in the form of reading large amounts, on
| subjects often beyond my comprehension, and distilling it down to
| something I can understand.
|
| Best of all, an opposing but equally compelling point of view is
| close by.
|
| Often the author/developer turns up. They can answer questions
| and provide additional context.
|
| I send the Link and text excerpts to myself by email and just
| search ycombinator to get a neat reading list of the most
| interesting stuff. Every month or so I will go back and read it
| or pickup a project that's caught my attention.
|
| Bitwarden, Tailscale, Shellfish for iPad all came to my attention
| here and have served me well.
|
| Here is an example post;
|
| >Hackers hijack and publish metal health data of hundreds of
| people
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886039
|
| SebaSeba:
|
| Some current background info: The breach and the extortion emails
| are at the moment on the front page of all major Finnish news
| publications. The Finnish government main ministers are
| discussing on how to handle the potential crisis, since there are
| possibly 40 000 patients' records leaked and some of the victims
| are already in a very vulnerable state and might be feeling even
| more desperate if their traumas will be publicly shared online.
| It is also known that there are minors among the victims.
|
| https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/psychotherapy_centre_reve...
|
| --
|
| Currently I hold an ENG1Medical certificate which is required by
| my job. And this has been fine to renew every two years with my
| Doctor for more than a decade.
|
| Now my employer has contracted the services of an external
| Occupational Health provider. They have presented an extensive
| questionnaire. Along with this they suggest an abnormally long
| data retention timeline with no reference to actually data
| legislation.
|
| After reading the comment by SebaSeba about what is going on in
| the wild there is no way I would participate in such obvious
| folly.
|
| The next comment;
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24887031
|
| ChrisMarshallNY:
|
| This is a classic "Damoclean sword" conundrum.
|
| The ability to digitize and aggregate the data, and maybe even
| subject it to some kinds of AI, might result in massive
| improvement in therapy.
|
| Mental health treatment has come an incredibly long way, just in
| the last couple of decades. It's even more amazing, when you look
| at how it went a hundred years ago. Some of the reasons are
| because of the ability to study treatment methodologies and
| outcomes.
|
| But having the data in a place that can happen, is very, very
| risky.
|
| ...
|
| Cool, so I have to sides of an argument. On one side using this
| data might help people. At the same time, keeping this data has
| been demonstrated to hurt people.
|
| If I filled in the survey it would be composed of "NO"and "Zero"
| type answers. No medical conditions or meaningful medical history
| and Zero alcohol.
|
| There is nothing beyond my basic ENG1 Medical certificate needed
| here. So the decision is simple, I won't be filling the
| questionnaire out.
|
| The other point about how people think is also present.
|
| "having the data... is very, very risky."
|
| And this idea, which is validated by the very cast of people who
| deal in the largest datasets in human history, can be applied to
| everything I do in life.
|
| What's it for? What are the risks?
|
| Of course I get labelled as difficult within my company in the
| short term, even predictable, but if I've listened to a debate on
| the subject I feel confident to weather the storm of an
| aggressive boss demanding I fill in the survey or face vauge
| punitive action.
| mettamage wrote:
| > Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart
| as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
|
| They may not count for you, but it has allowed to see me how easy
| most things are and that very few things are actually hard. I
| used to be a lot more intimidated by many things, but HN always
| gives a cursory glance into a topic with the right approach to
| explaining it, which leads me to adapt the mindset that's needed
| much faster than I'd be able to do when self-learning it.
|
| This even goes so far that whenever I need an opinion or need to
| learn something, I skip Google search and go straight to HN to
| see what their opinions are on the matter. Reddit doesn't come
| close to HN in this regard either.
|
| In the traditional sense of your question: I got no job out of it
| or anything. I did get contacted a few times for various reasons,
| and meeting up with other people is always fun :)
| idlewords wrote:
| It helped me learn to hate startup culture individual by
| individual, and not just as an abstract group.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Wouldn't want to be part of a club that would have me either.
| jarenmf wrote:
| I need something to scroll mindlessly and explore interesting
| stuff, after trying Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter I've
| found HN the most positive place on the Internet with the highest
| signal to noise ratio in posts and comments.
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| One of my comments in HN came up in a business transaction, where
| the opposing party wanted to know how a specific technical
| optimization problem I described, was solved.
|
| Generally, I appreciate reading the thoughts of other people who
| have views opposing my own, but with reasonable arguments, in a
| calm manner.
| jsherwani wrote:
| In December 2012, one of our early alpha users of Screenhero
| posted the product to HN. It catapulted us into the public beta
| phase, and got us our initial traction. Those users eventually
| helped us refine the product over a year and a half to get it to
| revenue, profitability and eventually, our acquisition by Slack.
|
| Almost a year ago, I posted my new startup (https://screen.so) to
| HN, and got a similar group of amazing users that have been
| helping us slowly but surely improve the product. We've now got a
| number of household-name companies using us on a daily basis.
|
| It's also my favorite site to visit every day in the hope of
| learning something new. There's nothing quite like it.
|
| So yes, HN has changed my life multiple times. Kudos to the
| community and to dang and others who make this site as awesome as
| it is on a daily basis.
|
| I have, admittedly, gotten zero wives directly through HN!
| santa_boy wrote:
| With a little discipline of not going overboard with surfing
| here, I've been able to get the following from HN:
|
| i) Discover really cool new projects (mainly open-source) ii)
| Find ways of generating income on the internet through first hand
| inputs iii) Get in touch with cool people with useful things to
| say occasionally iv) Relate to challenges faced by many others
| and gain inspiration v) Develop gratitude for self when reading
| about things others have faced and have had to overcome vi) Feel
| more globally connected. Many users are approachable for one-to-
| one chats
| lordnacho wrote:
| 1) Education. There's regularly links to important topics in eg
| Machine Learning or low level coding. I use the favourites
| feature as a bookmarks thing.
|
| 2) News digest. HN tends to be ahead of the curve on things that
| touch on tech, eg privacy.
|
| 3) Qualified contacts. I don't often write to people directly
| (email), but the times I have it's always been worthwhile.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| One of my employees found my company through a "Who's Hiring?"
| post, so that's a huge benefit to me. I definitely prefer
| speaking with people directly than having to deal with
| recruiters. Otherwise, it's interesting for me to occasionally
| see what people are thinking about, but I try not to let it
| consume too much of my time.
| tpetry wrote:
| HN had no business impact on me but it is the best information
| source i am aware of. I get to see bleeding edge technologies
| discussed first. The vast i will never use but i do get a broad
| view of technologies which are new, interesting to test or see
| them maturing. But the best information is seeing articles about
| companies struggling with some new tech. Whether it's an database
| which has a lot of problems writing data safely to disk and
| loosing data (MongoDB), some horror stories ops teams had when
| having to debug a PaaS for days because of some complex problems
| (Kubernetes), an article why a company switched away from a cool
| new database which could provide live updates on changes (can't
| remember the name, product is now open source and not really
| maintained as company shut down) or people experiencing latency
| problems with new technologies calculating every interaction on
| the server ( Phoenix LiveView and all clones). So i didn't get
| more money, build a cool business or got more attractive for the
| other gender but i am at the bleeding edge on technologies
| without having all the problems of depending on them. I can use
| them when they mature or simply ignore them because sticking to
| more boring technologies will be better for my mental health. I
| do get a lot of knowledge on hn which i don't get anywhere else.
| Ps.: If you don't want to participate in discussions it's really
| nice skimming through the comments 48h after the topic got
| popular. So much information without a big time investment.
| bflies wrote:
| HN does offer quite educated conversations about a wider spectrum
| touching tech, startups, investing, business models, science and
| just being on the edge of things. Sometimes with high profile
| folks from those industries. There is no other community like
| this, even no sub on reddit.
|
| However, I find as good discussions in specific reddit subs with
| (of course) less dogma since you are then in some subs with like-
| minded folks. Here you get quickly downvoted for slightly "wrong"
| wordings/messaging/opinions which again makes sense because the
| variety of audiences is higher here but also hurts the user
| experiences. So while reddit is often real fun and ends with long
| convos on some discords, HN is somehow different and creates some
| obsessive behavior before and after paired with a weird need to
| be "right" which I do not experience in this strength on other
| forums. While it educates (sometimes), HN often leaves some
| aftertaste.
|
| Then there is--because of a huge number of YC members and alumnis
| --some bias here which reflects in respective up- and
| downvotings, extra boosts and gravities, flagging, shadow-banning
| (HN has probably the most sophisticated shadow banning techniques
| than any other forum) and in general very fast
| moderation/correction of unwanted behavior.
|
| But yeah, every community has their pros and cons. FWIW, I limit
| my HN time while I do not limit my time on reddit.
| dijit wrote:
| There's upsides and downsides. I learned a lot about how to steel
| man arguments and to hold decent, well cited arguments online.
|
| I learned about lots of things I wouldn't have otherwise learned
| exist.
|
| And ultimately I learned that I can program, from seeing that
| even the people who are pro/excellent can do the wrong thing,
| that the barrier isn't all that high, and there is still large
| value in gluing libraries together for a purpose.
| pjmorris wrote:
| In your context, I didn't actually get the tangible benefit that
| was there, so this doesn't fully count. However, I became aware
| of Bitcoin when they were going for ~9 cents, and thought
| seriously about buying 300-400 when they were $1 due to another
| HN article. I'm sure I'd have spent the BTC on pizza or something
| even if I'd bought it, but there are tech waves that start as
| ripples and HN is one of the first places to see those ripples.
|
| > Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart
| as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
|
| I happen to think the intellectual debate aspect is an important
| one.
| [deleted]
| mellosouls wrote:
| I've enjoyed reading and engaging in discussions with reasonable
| people (who I sometimes fervently disagree with) on HN. Nothing
| more; a diversion at worst, a source of information from which I
| can learn at best (signal to noise, compared to your average
| forum).
|
| It's never occurred to me to judge its benefits solely (or at
| all!) in material or monetary value as implied, and I wouldn't
| want to see the world in such a narrow way.
| bobkrusty wrote:
| Cool products, valuable knowledge / informations not all tho, you
| can make friends here too....
| wsostt wrote:
| So many. I'm a product owner so I'm interested in a lot of things
| that come across HN: management resources, new technology,
| trending ideas and concepts, and other stuff that I didn't know I
| needed to know.
|
| The real value comes from the thoughtful conversations in the
| comments. An article on Snowflake is going to touch in
| competitors, management advice is going to have a link to a book
| that goes deeper, etc...
| mhenr18 wrote:
| Every so often, posts from Bruce Dawson's blog get posted here -
| one such post was about using Event Tracing for Windows to
| diagnose an issue with an NTFS lock being held causing 63 cores
| to idle while 1 does all the work.
|
| https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...
|
| A few months later, some other people in my team were struggling
| to diagnose an issue in production where a legacy webapp was
| struggling to scale up and fully use all 64 cores of the server
| we needed it to run on. I stepped in to help and remembered that
| post I'd seen on HN. We used ETW (through Windows Performance
| Recorder and Windows Performance Analyzer) to profile our app and
| I looked into the Wait Analysis. Turns out that Entity Framework
| 6 uses a ReaderWriterLockSlim to guard a cache, and that
| particular lock performs extremely poorly under heavy contention.
| Heavy in our case meant that for a single page build of one of
| this app's "hot path" pages, this lock would be taken a few
| hundred thousand times. We weren't the first to discover this:
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/1500
|
| What some other people in my team were struggling with for about
| two weeks was resolved in a single day thanks to me goofing off
| and reading HN. (We ultimately used a fork of EF6 that didn't
| suffer from this issue to solve our problem)
| yaseer wrote:
| HN changed the trajectory of our company entirely, after the
| community found it interesting.
|
| The story is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26327717
|
| There are a lot of influential people on HN. I have seen
| companies win business and lose business for content posted here.
|
| Either way, If the community takes interest in something
| (positive or negative), it is impactful.
| bbno4 wrote:
| 1. HackerNews shares my articles sometimes and I get ~1 million
| views / year from it 2. Monthly "who is hiring" threads. I don't
| think I'd have my job without them. 3. Interesting things you
| can't find anywhere else.
| 0x1DEADCA0 wrote:
| It is a waste of time and a growing place of toxicity a smugness,
| but it is not very different from the rest of the internet.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| > toxicity smugness
|
| Sad but true, it's kinda like what stackoverflow has become.
| It's also site of overwhelming group-think.
|
| I anticipate downvotes to prove my point.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Growing? You must be new here...
| redis_mlc wrote:
| I'd agree. For experienced technologists, HN has become
| increasingly tedious - it's eternal September here.
|
| Don't even get me started with the weekly UFO posts ...
| jsilence wrote:
| I especially like that HN is free of sarcasm.
| k_sze wrote:
| Also the lack of meta.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah none of that stuff.
| ForrestN wrote:
| I got a much clearer sense of the deeply Ayn Rand political
| sensibilities of HN and much of startup world. I naively expected
| a mix of sort of normal California liberalism with utopic,
| egalitarian aspirations. But in fact the dominant ideas seem to
| be a kind of just-got-to-college paused-philosophical social
| Darwinism, I'm special so regulation is just a hindrance, social
| issues and justice are just a distraction kind of vibe. Getting a
| deep feel for that here transformed my relationship to startup
| culture in an important way, and I'm grateful for that.
| Bakary wrote:
| There is the crypto-Rand crowd as you've described it, but
| there's also the neoliberal technocratic mindset that
| everything can be condescendingly fixed with technology or
| scientific/bro-scientific inquiry. In this case, the
| technocratic ideology is considered as standing outside of the
| realm of ideology and culture, and as a natural result of
| enlightened thought that manages to transcend bias. By this
| framework, "normal" people must be manipulated for their own
| good.
| username91 wrote:
| Seeing what other people are working on via HN dulls my desire to
| work on similar things, so it's a nice way to kill ambition and
| melt into complacency.
| PhillyG wrote:
| Why not offer to collaborate with them if you're interested in
| doing something too?
| davidfstr wrote:
| HN occasionally alerts me to the existence of new tools or trends
| that I can leverage in business.
|
| For example:
|
| * About 5 years ago I happened to read about the Material Design
| Lite library on HN which I then used for my then-nascent startup
| to get our initial website up and running quickly in the Material
| Design UI language. (And for that purpose it has worked quite
| well.)
|
| * Emscripten & WASM-related tech has been useful for implementing
| some of the "secret sauce" at my startup.
|
| * The recent attention given to Cosmopolitan has unlocked a
| specific technical hurdle (around multi-platform support) for a
| digital preservation venture I'm planning to start as a side
| project soon.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I hired two strong engineers directly from contacts made here.
|
| I made one (modestly) successful angel investment from a chain of
| events inseparably linked to here.
|
| I do value the intangible enjoyment/education from HN much more
| than the concrete things above, though.
|
| There's no way the time I spend here is "paid back" just from the
| concrete RoI items and if you're trying to build a financial
| Excel model to decide whether to spend time here, your answer
| probably rounds to "No"
| karterk wrote:
| I've been following HN for 10+ years, first as a lurker and then
| getting into the whole "build something people want" thing. Over
| the years, I've "launched" quite a few projects here. Some have
| failed, while others have succeeded far beyond my modest
| expectations. But in a pre Product Hunt era, launching on HN was
| the only way to get exposure to your product. Even today, for a
| number of highly technical projects, HN is the best place to get
| the word out.
|
| While HN crowd has a reputation of being too cynical at times
| (the most famous example being the original "Show HN Dropbox"),
| over time, pre-empting how the HN crowd will potentially react
| and what kind of criticism a project might attract has actually
| helped me improve the product before launch!
|
| > I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But
| just for one day.
|
| My latest project, Typesense, which is an open source instant
| search engine (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) literally
| found traction only after posting here on HN. Yes, it was a ~50K
| single day traffic, but it had a permanent impact on the baseline
| traffic. So nothing is as useless as it looks :)
|
| Apart from the value I've gotten out of all these Show HNs, there
| is an incredible amount of value in the comments on HN. In fact,
| I often just skip the main post and just skim through the
| comments. Also, unlike certain other forums, snarky/toxic
| comments are discouraged and moderated.
| frob wrote:
| 1) I found my first job out of grad school via a startup's Show
| HN post. It began a successful chain of SWE positions for me and
| unlocked many doors.
|
| 2) I was inspired to relearn JS and web development when Jen
| Dewalt's fabulous journey of 100 (now 180) websites in 100 (180)
| days was posted daily: https://jenniferdewalt.com/. I credit it
| with giving me the baseline to pass those interviews. I later had
| the luck to work with Jen and the joy of letting her know how she
| shaped my career.
|
| 3) Introduced me to Clojure which I loved having learned Scheme
| in the past. This baseline again allowed me to nail that first
| job interview.
|
| 4) In general, keeps me up to date on emerging technologies,
| services, and trends. Knowing about sendgird and postmates and
| their general features and pricing off the top of my head in my
| most recent job interview seemed to earn me some bonus points
| from the CTO.
| ookblah wrote:
| hacker news is good to me for keeping a bead on latest tech stuff
| (sometimes related to work). i've def gotten some use mainly out
| of finding new processes, apps, etc. that help run business
| better.
|
| it's filtered significantly better than something like reddit,
| but ultimately if you spend any good amount time on it you're
| just "wasting it". if you want tangible benefits in anything you
| have to "do" vs. accumulating knowledge.
| pawurb wrote:
| Story about my SAAS made it to the front page ~3 years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616991 . Back than the
| project was making some pocket money. I've received a lot of
| valuable insights in the comments. It allowed me refine the
| features and business model, to a much more profitable format.
| Right now this project is my main source of income and it allowed
| me to quit my job to focus on pursuing other challenges.
|
| BTW I use this magic link
| https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 to filter out less
| valuable stories that "growth hackers" push to the frontpage.
| Since I've started using it, browsing HN has become much more
| pleasant.
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| I figured out there was a pandemic in January 2020 and was able
| to shelter at home and buy a few essentials (like tp) which ran
| out of stock for a while.
| graeme wrote:
| Hacker News is like a slot machine with positive expected value.
| Most days are interesting or sometimes a waste of time.
| Occasionally you see something like altering. I've gotten one big
| business idea that changed how I ran things and made me a lot of
| money. Like I mean permanently life altering my business worked
| instead of didn't amount of money.
|
| But most days are not like that.
|
| You also get some information early. For example, if you paid
| attention you could have bought calls on Gamestop when they were
| cheap or puts on the S and P when they were cheap back in early
| 2020. It's a filter: WSB talks about a ton of stocks, but when a
| news story hits HN that says "WSB is talking about Gamestop"?
| That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside
| information.
|
| Hacker News can be dumb in some ways of course but it is the
| highest signal place I know on the internet and genuinely _early_
| on a lot of things.
|
| However, to get any benefit out of it you have to _enjoy_ it, and
| it doesn't sound like you do, so you probably wouldn't benefit as
| things are.
|
| I think the motto about it being a place to gratify intellectual
| curious really sums it up. This is a forum for people who are
| curious, and you come every day looking for interesting stuff.
| Slanted to programming, tech and business building, but with a
| mix of everything. And if you think about what you are working on
| as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The biggest life-altering idea that was personally investable
| to cross hacker news is most certainly Bitcoin. That's
| something we all knew intimately about before the general
| public.
|
| I wonder how many HN people became buy-and-hold millionaires.
| graeme wrote:
| Heh, I think about that a lot. But no way I would have held
| until now, personally.
|
| However, for anyone psychologically inclined to like the idea
| of BTC and hold they could have found out about it early and
| got them for pennies or even mined.
| [deleted]
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "And if you think about what you are working on as you do you
| will occasionally find legitimately useful gems."
|
| This for me. I'm greatly satisfied when a problem I'm working
| is also a topic oh HN--even obliquely.
|
| Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse
| --power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of
| engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good
| decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a
| bottle.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| I think you hit the crux of the issue.
|
| On the one hand, life does not work the way OP assumes. It's
| not linear, we don't "read HN -> profit."
|
| On the other hand, news in general _can_ become a meaningless
| and value-less distraction.
|
| So I think they key is what you said: intellectual curiosity
| and exposure to high-signal information, without a highly
| specific goal in mind. You get the value of serendipity and
| filling in some unknown unknowns while avoiding senseless and
| endless clicking. HN fills that niche about as well as
| anything, though it certainly can become a distraction if you
| let it.
| geswit2x wrote:
| > " Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the
| horse--power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a
| life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and
| good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not
| lighting in a bottle."
|
| I read HN for sentences like this.
| graeme wrote:
| > Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the
| horse--power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a
| life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and
| good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not
| lighting in a bottle.
|
| Precisely. Well put. There's no way HN works as a quick fix
| or as a direct source of gains.
| mettamage wrote:
| I'm happy OP asked the question, because this wasn't/wouldn't
| be in my answer. But now that I've read yours, I couldn't agree
| more.
| matwood wrote:
| > That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside
| information.
|
| As a person who gets paid convert knowledge into product, HN is
| an easy place to check a once or twice/day to keep up to date
| on decently filtered knowledge/information. I have other
| sources I follow, but as you said, if it hits HN it's probably
| important enough that I should know it exist.
|
| And yes, this is a vague answer because that base level
| knowledge can manifest itself in many ways when solving a
| problem.
|
| In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more
| disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments
| on.
| mariksolo wrote:
| What sources do you follow other than HN?
| danieka wrote:
| That sounds like a very interesting job. Without giving away
| too much, what other sources do you use?
| matwood wrote:
| What I've found generally, is it's all about curation. You
| have to be ruthless about curating at all times. If some
| source that used to have a great S/N ratio, suddenly
| doesn't, then drop it.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Very much agreed. Nostalgia seldom pays off.
| 177tcca wrote:
| Probably reddit, lobsters, newsgroups, mailing lists,
| Matrix, IRC, etc. Like any good CTO type.
| ignoramous wrote:
| CTO roles are not as rigid or well-defined as one would
| assume: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_
| different_c...
| graeme wrote:
| > In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more
| disciplined around which articles I decide to read the
| comments on.
|
| Can you expand on your methods here? I still get value from
| HN but want to dial things back a bit.
| User23 wrote:
| The average comment quality nosedives when the subject has
| in any way been politicized. I don't always follow it, but
| as a rule for any post about climate, immigration,
| diversity, and so on reading the comments is at best a
| waste of time even when the submission is high quality.
|
| Comment quality is generally high on computing related
| technical subjects--unsurprisingly for a community composed
| of subject matter experts.
|
| Finally I've noticed mixed comment quality on financial
| posts. There is significant noise but there are many
| commenters with an excellent operational grasp of how our
| financial system really works.
| chubot wrote:
| Yes agreed. I find it's pretty easy to tell comments and
| stories where people are genuinely interested in learning
| things, and those where there is a lot of "advocacy" or
| meming of a political position they heard from somebody
| else.
|
| Some subjects attract a lot of the latter comments. This
| applies to both technical and business stories.
|
| IMO if you want to get more value, then learn to tell the
| difference, and don't spend a lot of time "arguing with
| people on the Internet". You could do that forever on HN,
| but you can also get a ton of value out of it if you
| spend your attention wisely.
| matwood wrote:
| As someone else mentioned, I avoid anything political
| unless I'm purposely diving in for entertainment. The tech
| comments are normally high quality, and tend to force me to
| think about my opinions. Also, while everywhere has some
| level of group think, the tech comments tend to be pretty
| balanced.
|
| I've developed a bit of timer in my head. If I feel like
| I've perused HN too long or catch myself just refreshing
| the home page, I close the tab and move on.
|
| Finally, and this isn't HN specific, I never start my day
| by checking sites. I always do a solid 2-3 hours of work
| (sometimes 'deep'), before anything else.
|
| EDIT
|
| Other thing, is don't argue on the internet or HN. I'll
| share my opinion and/or respond a bit, but if someone
| really wants to argue, I let them have it and move on.
| Takes too much time, and doesn't gain anything once I'm ok
| with my position. I mentioned the other day in another HN
| post that I had stopped going to FB for this exact reason.
| Zero helpful information, and it just led to arguments
| which take too much time and accomplish nothing.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| You've crowd sourced your job to some of the most engaged
| people in the industry; bravo.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| It would be nice to know more about what you got out of HN
| (permanently life improving, I'd like some of that please?). To
| me, HN is an interesting distraction from deep work. Perhaps
| you have a better strategy of extracting value from HN, maybe
| you can share that.
|
| I can't disprove "That is a highly filtered signal and
| equivalent to inside information.", but buying GME based on
| posts on HN to me (or selling), is absurd and is extremely far
| from "inside information". As someone who noticed the GME pump
| 1 week before its peak and spends time on HN, there was no way
| I was going to put money in GME or "ride it to the moon".
| graeme wrote:
| Basically I was running a business, and found someone on HN
| whose site exposed me to a substantially better model for the
| same asset I had. Revenues eventually 10x.
|
| It's not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for
| my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically
| you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific
| model wouldn't help you here, but basically if you have a
| business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly:
|
| 1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset
|
| 2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better
|
| 3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only
| aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing
| deep work (I fall prey to this at times)
|
| You'll see some stories in this thread of people who were not
| programmers on HN and who received the message "hey you can
| be a programmer". If you have this knowledge it is trivial,
| if you don't it is life transforming. So whether HN has any
| life transforming potential for you depends on whether you
| have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the
| right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path
| which is substantially better than the old path.
|
| ----------
|
| For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background
| knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic
| knowledge of call options.
|
| 1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the
| surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big
| signal is showing "hey wsb seems to be on to something, it
| made it through the hn bubble":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208
|
| 2. My reaction was "oh interesting" (--> note to self "stop
| and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early
| pandemic stories too)
|
| 3. But what you could have done was checked the price of
| short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan
| 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too
| small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call
| options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose
| 10x so I'd be surprised if call options returned less than
| that.
|
| (If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan
| 20th I'd be very interested to know_
|
| Don't put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you
| faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time
| your ROI would be very positive.
|
| The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and
| adjacent tech sources I'd say I knew pretty much what was
| going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too
| slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north
| America.
|
| I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve.
|
| Disclaimer, to all reading: please don't start gambling on
| HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim
| that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to
| other sources and has high signal.
| chris_st wrote:
| > _If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on
| jan 20th I'd be very interested to know_
|
| Look here: https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain
| graeme wrote:
| Are those american or european?
|
| Doesn't have high out of the money but if I'm reading it
| right the potential returns for buying Jan 20th were
| insane. A $60 call potion expiring Jan 29th was $1.20.
|
| GME went to $500 or so. If you exercised such an option
| at, say, $350, your profit on the exercise would have
| been $290.
|
| At a cost of $1.20. 242x return.
|
| And thank you, that site is incredible. Very hard to find
| such data. Another example of HN's value. I searched for
| this kind of thing off and on for weeks, but it randomly
| pops up on an unrelated thread because I made an offhand
| mention. That's HN.
| chris_st wrote:
| You're most welcome -- glad I had the link.
|
| > _Very hard to find such data._
|
| That is the understatement of the decade.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The options are American-style.
|
| I also love the typo of "potion" for option in your
| second paragraph. It seems especially fitting for this
| story.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Yes, it's a waste of time, I would leave and not return. I
| haven't made any money or started any companies or met any wives
| on this site, it's a total joke.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Thank you for this gem and the responses. I haven't laughed out
| loud from something I've read on HN as much as I just did
| thanks to this comment and its children comments.
|
| Even though I got zero wives out of these comments, there was
| some real value generated here!
| superbcarrot wrote:
| > or met any wives on this site
|
| The wife has negative ROI anyway. If she isn't getting me more
| money, a new job or another wife, there is no tangible benefit.
|
| Also feelings, life satisfaction, love as benefits etc. don't
| count in this context.
| mpfundstein wrote:
| what about the tangible benefit of having well-raised kids?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Kids?
|
| Don't you know the very bad ROI they have??
|
| (unless you count in cuteness)
| grumple wrote:
| Your ROI needs to measure returns other than money.
|
| But kids can end up making money, too, and take care of
| you when you're older.
| ignoramous wrote:
| On the flip side, you _do_ at least get to meet tech bros and
| not have to pay for conference tickets. That 's gotta count for
| something.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I'm genuinely surprised (and a little disappointed) that this
| thread doesn't have a single love story sparked on HN. I _did_
| once receive a bunch of shirtless bathroom selfies from a
| gentleman here when I included my twitter handle in a comment.
| Unfortunately, I blocked him before he had the chance to
| propose so I guess I'm doomed to forever wonder what could have
| been...
| NathanielK wrote:
| I think that's another reason I like HN. There is no direct
| messaging like other social media, so if someone wants to
| interact with you they need to reply publicly.
|
| It's a small thing, but I think it is an important part of
| HN.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Someone should start an app to disrupt the wives and companies
| market.
| krapp wrote:
| >I haven't made any money or started any companies or met any
| wives on this site, it's a total joke.
|
| From my reading of HN, what you need to do is invest in crypto
| and date ballerinas.
| tiddles wrote:
| I only browse sites with an average ROI of at least 1 wife per
| week.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| You got a bulk rate on wedding cake?
|
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| alexilliamson wrote:
| Honestly I've been seeing that ROI from HN for quite a while.
| Sometimes a wife per day! I would say to spend more time on
| the wife threads.
| Ariez wrote:
| HN to start monthly thread: Who's single?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Oh no. Pls don't. Because it probably would be highly
| successful. Or well, much used. (Not necessarily leading to
| couples, though)
| tobmlt wrote:
| Well I for one am glad you are here, Borat!
| wakatime wrote:
| HN is part of the reason I moved to SF back in the day and
| started my company. My company is the reason I met my wife,
| because she saw me wearing a t-shirt I made to promote it while
| walking down the street in SF. You could say HN is the reason I
| met my wife ;)
| topspin wrote:
| Free clues.
| Balgair wrote:
| I posted a comment once bemoaning the high costs of one of my
| SO's medications. The chemical compound in question is used by
| horse veterinarians as a supplement for their joints; think
| something like how Vitamin-D is put into milk. Due to
| medical/legal issues, the only source for this compound in the US
| is via a MD or a VD (or so we thought). The cost is ~$2/pill,
| taken thrice daily. Depending on the insurance plan, it can go up
| to ~$10/pill. This cost had been keeping our family from changing
| jobs and careers as the medical costs had to be factored in
| during salary negotiations. Like many Americans, we were enslaved
| to our insurance plan.
|
| A extraordinarily kind HNer pointed me towards how to search for
| bulk manufactured chemicals.
|
| A few weeks later we got 1 cubic meter of the stuff. The cubic
| meter being the smallest volume the company would send. It will
| last my SO's entire lifetime and then a few more.
|
| That HNer gave us the gift of _freedom_.
| Itsdijital wrote:
| Well whats the compound? Perhaps someone else reading it could
| benefit from this too.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Beware using non-pharmaceutical grade ingredients. Lab grade is
| not the same as pharmaceutical grade. If things go wrong then
| the liability is on you. It may also have implications for your
| health insurance.
|
| I have commented on this before, _caveat emptor_ :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040423
| arboles wrote:
| Can you point us to the post that pointed you towards how to
| search for bulk manufactured chemicals?
| justhw wrote:
| It might be this thread.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398381
| spsphulse wrote:
| ^This. I would love to know this as well.
| tebbers wrote:
| Amazing story, how much did you have to pay for the cubic meter
| and how did you take delivery?!
| skinkestek wrote:
| Someone got a correct diagnosis based on something I read on HN,
| his brother was the diagnosed with the same diagnosis.
|
| Good for both of them.
| domano wrote:
| HN is an important way for me to keep up with new development
| technologies and methodologies, more so than any other single
| website i know.
|
| This has helped with my standing in the company i work at, since
| i usually know every technology people are talking about. I don't
| know of anyone in the company with a similiarily broad knowledge.
| analog31 wrote:
| HN is where I got interested in seriously improving my
| programming skills, several years ago. I was doing a lot of
| programming, but not employed as a programmer, so I had let my
| skills become outdated. Coincidentally, the language getting
| all of the "buzz" at the time was Python, which just really
| clicked for me.
|
| Reading HN has also been the start of many a good nap. ;-)
| [deleted]
| woutr_be wrote:
| Just my personal opinion, but if you're looking for a place to
| advertise your startup, then I doubt HN is the right place.
|
| Personally I come to HN because it's one of the few places you
| can have a discussion and read comments without having to dig
| through dozens of memes and low attempt jokes.
| quantstats wrote:
| I was going to answer in a similar vein, although I don't
| normally participate in the discussions, mainly because English
| is not my native tongue and although I think I can now read at
| the level of a native speaker, I find it significantly more
| difficult to write in it (and, being a language that for
| reasons that elude me I love, I hate how artificial and
| unnatural my phrases sound like).
|
| In my case, I have a background in statistics and biotechnology
| and I use Hacker News (via RSS) to learn about new developments
| in machine learning and related technology. I tend to ignore
| all news related to politics/social issues because HN, on
| average, has a very narrow-minded (too engineer-like, often
| ignoring a lot of vital nuances) way of looking at those
| topics. Also, I'm from Europe and I find that there's a
| particularly American way of looking at business and personal
| projects that we don't have here and that I feel beneficial to
| get exposed to (even with its downsides).
|
| Edit: To expand a little more on my process of using HN, in
| case anyone finds it interesting, I subscribe to the frontpage
| RSS feed, so that I usually get between 75-100 stories (just
| the headlines) per day, which I then proceed to quickly scan to
| open the interesting ones (both the original URL and its
| accompanying HN discussion). I've found the signal/noise ratio
| to be more than worth it (also factoring in the time it takes
| me to do all of this).
| jraby3 wrote:
| Wow, I have to say that I think you write beautifully. I'm a
| native English speaker learning a second language and I can
| only hope to be able to write this well.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Well, the level of English in this comment is well above that
| of the average on Hacker News!
| quantstats wrote:
| Thank you for your comment, you've really brightened up my
| day!
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| On the other hand, it may be one of the last places left where
| you can actually naturally advice.
|
| Stuff like...
|
| "Oh I can tell you a thing or two about the legal complications
| of cubesat launches, my company did this for the last 12 years.
| [...]. By the way, this is our website"
|
| ...is probably more effective _if_ a potential client stumbles
| over it than 100,000 "targeted" facebook ads, especially if
| you serve some highly technical niche.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| It may be relevant if your startup provides a product (tools or
| services) targeting HN demographics, let's say, technical
| users/tech companies/startups.
| graeme wrote:
| I actually found my favourite finance tracker, Lunch Money,
| because the creator posted here. And her posting it here really
| helped her company grow.
|
| So it does happen a fair bit _if_ your startup is relevant.
|
| https://lunchmoney.app/
| stareatgoats wrote:
| 1) I posted this project and I started some company. Sold it or
| earning a lot of money or living my dream: No
|
| 2) I was hired because of my post on HN: No
|
| 3) Girls chasing you because of your reputation as HN: No, and no
| guys either.
|
| Not to be flippant, but you seem to have misunderstood the intent
| of HN (if this post was made in earnest that is). If these are
| the things you want to get out of HN then you should probably get
| out, for the sakes of both your own and HN in general.
| Alternatively try and learn to enjoy the benefits of
| knowledgeable discussion about all sorts of topics that may not
| fit inside your normal bubble.
| hoodwink wrote:
| Met my co-founder thru HN comments. We've since operated a
| delightful consumer SaaS business called Readwise for the past 4
| years. I think this speaks to the main benefit for me: hanging
| out with forward-thinking technologists I couldn't in real life.
| sytse wrote:
| I did a Show HN for the idea of a SaaS for GitLab and I'm now the
| CEO of a $6b company.
| [deleted]
| tryeverything wrote:
| HN changed my life. Seriously. I started using this site fairly
| young, and it shaped my view of the world and who I am as a
| person more than almost anything.
|
| Because of HN comments, I fixed some serious health issues
| (search your symptoms on HN, write down all the wacky advice, and
| do everything that's safe!), I tried MDMA (which is magical), I
| made tons of money, I kept my mind sharp, I traveled to
| interesting places, I found other groups that led to lifelong
| friendships...
|
| HN also recommended me every single one of my favorite books
| (mostly old fiction), a good portion of my wardrobe (Darn Tough
| socks, various denim etc), my laptops, my audio setup, and my
| financial setup. Heck, even my underwear was a recommendation
| from HN - if you haven't, try merino wool underwear, it feels
| like your ass is being caressed by God.
|
| You specifically mentioned romance and sex, so I'll touch on that
| aspect. The most valuable advice HN gave me on this subject was
| that attractiveness is not set in stone. Take the most attractive
| actors and take away their personal grooming, their fashionable
| well-fitting clothes, their physical condition, their clean skin,
| their diet, confidence, career, money and relationships and
| you'll have someone that would fail to catch your eye at
| McDonalds. (Seriously - look up the ones who went off the rails.)
| All of the above are things that anyone can improve. Fix a number
| of those things, find attractive women and talk to them like
| they're human and not a sex object - and I can guarantee you
| sexual and romantic success. I was an unattractive nerd who was
| laughed down by girls and even fixing a minority of the items on
| the list above was enough that (pre-Covid) I never had a problem
| finding beautiful, intelligent, interesting women for serious
| relationships, casual dating or sex. Everyone I know who's done
| the same has had similar results. You won't meet a partner on HN
| (or Reddit, or Facebook, or anywhere) - despite their colossal
| userbases, there are only a few stories of people who met their
| partner on those sites. The best dating site was pre-2017
| OKCupid, but that is dead and gone now. Real life is your best
| shot - otherwise try Tinder, or modern OKCupid.
|
| Another reason this place is beautiful is because of the small
| community feel, despite being a relatively large website. Many
| people know each other IRL, many get to know the names they butt
| heads with, and when one of the many famous users drops in
| there's often an intelligent and interesting discussion. For that
| reason I'm very hesitant to see it grow. In that regard, I'm
| thankful for the 90s design, large amount of boring programming
| things (I can code, but many of the programming posts are drier
| than hell), and even to a degree the new-user-unfriendly
| atmosphere - they all slow growth. Serious growth would be fatal
| to a place like this.
|
| HN isn't great for everything, though. Music is one huge blind
| spot. Another thing is that the HN discussion style doesn't carry
| on over into the real world. HN will love your massive, detailed
| comment and it will ask for more, but in the real world even
| people who love and care about you have a finite, human attention
| span. On HN, if you keep your argument short and simple people
| will poke holes in it, but in the real world nobody expects your
| arguments to be watertight and bulletproof (and you better not
| expect that of others' arguments!)
|
| Spend too much time in HN, and it rubs off on you: the skeptical
| attitude, the long-windedness, the cultural and political views
| and most importantly the feeling of superiority. Even stupid
| people aren't stupid - they'll sense your feelings of superiority
| eventually. It's easy to fall into this because HN values the
| optimal, and it values comments correcting someone's non-optimal
| ways. For example, with retirement accounts, even a relatively
| minor mistake (an account or ETF with high fees, wrong type of
| contributions, etc etc) can compound into missed tens of
| thousands of dollars. Logic would dictate that you should tell as
| many people about this as possible! Practical experience,
| however, tells me that no matter how you explain things, _most_
| people will just feel bad about themselves for their mistake
| (even if they don't show it) and oftentimes won't even correct
| it. If you really can't help yourself, you can casually mention
| the topic as gently and briefly as possible - "oh cool, I did xyz
| for a while too, then I heard that abc might be better, you
| should look it up sometime." Alternatively, don't make it into a
| comparison - just (briefly!) mention your positive experience and
| let that stand alone.
|
| If you understand that last paragraph, you will finally
| understand why so many people truly hate vegans, or nerds, or the
| modern left... or HN users. People like people that are like
| them, and if you feel like you're not like them, you won't be
| liked. If you try to convert them to your ideology, or insist
| it's the only option, you will be hated. You can narrow down your
| life goals, your identity and your politics to a tiny segment of
| the population, or you can look to our common aspects and realize
| that we're all human, just trying to live our short lives on this
| tiny blue dot of a planet.
| awillen wrote:
| I posted a comment on a thread about side hustles - it was about
| a new business I had just started. That got me a small but
| significant for the time number of sales (which were doubly
| important because most of my sales before that had been to
| friends or friends of friends).
|
| Between the sales and a lot of positive comments, it really made
| me think that my product was something people wanted, and I
| decided to stick with the business and go full time.
|
| Back then I was doing a few sales a week, now I'm at ~20/day, and
| that's just because I'm at my limit in terms of production
| capacity. I'm now looking to move to a contract manufacturer
| ASAP. Once I do that, I can crank up the FB ad spend (that's my
| main customer acquisition channel, and I've got one ad that's
| extremely effective) and really get rolling.
|
| So yeah, pretty possible that a comment on HN will turn out to be
| fairly life-changing. Hopefully that makes up for all the
| definitely-not-life-changing time I've frittered away on here.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I've all but given up social media elsewhere on the web, HN is
| one of my last holdouts, and I would argue that's it's more of a
| forum than classic social media.
|
| HN does not engage in nefarious methods of keeping you engaged.
| It does not send you alerts telling you about what you've missed,
| it does not curate the home page to place you in your own
| personal echo chamber. These for me are it's strengths.
|
| However, like any large social gathering, there will always be
| people whose views you cannot stand, and people who you feel
| closely aligned to, and this is healthy.
|
| Whenever I see comment threads spiralling into toxic views I
| simply click away to another thread. For every bad comment
| section there will always be another good one. The key thing is,
| as a user I drive how I consume HN, not the other way around.
|
| I may not be the original target demographic for HN and I've
| certainly not had any more than my 5 minutes of fame here, but I
| still find myself coming for the posts, and staying for the
| comments.
| Ariez wrote:
| I have to agree it does feel more like a forum. I wonder how HN
| achieves this.
| fuball63 wrote:
| I think there are a few reasons it feels more like a forum
| than social media:
|
| - No social network of friends/follows/circles
|
| - No advertising
|
| - No notifications on replies/threads
|
| - Good moderation
| meowster wrote:
| I heard about Bitcoin when the whitepaper was released, however I
| never profited from that experience, so when I heard about Monero
| in someone's comment years ago, I bought some of that and have
| made some pretty good (tangible) money.
| corobo wrote:
| Relaxation and distraction without pun threads. Guaranteed
| stimulation on a break
|
| I love reading technical blog posts. Raw tech rather than tech
| besmirched by the business development department.
|
| Not everything needs to be part of the hustle. Make time for you!
| busterarm wrote:
| I've been a hobbyist programmer since I was about 6 years old. I
| had done just about every other job in IT besides sling code.
|
| Reading HN and conversing with a friend of mine in a CS program
| at Uni are what motivated me to turn my hobby into a new career,
| at 31 years old. It was through HN that I realized that I knew a
| heck of a lot more relevant job skills than I thought I did.
| Threads on HN also connected the dots for what it would take to
| make this my profession.
|
| The career change itself only took me about 3 months, but reading
| HN was years of time invested.
|
| I've also had some constructive interviews, on both sides, as a
| result of the monthly job threads.
| dorumus wrote:
| The mildly intriguing information that I find on HN has
| definitely been useful in plenty of contexts. A very tangible one
| was one HN article about garbage collector implementation from
| zero which I read simply because it was intriguing. Then found
| myself in a bloomberg interview where we ended up talking about
| GC and it was a pleasure to discuss the details having read that
| article a couple of month before
| [deleted]
| jmartrican wrote:
| It got me away from watching/reading the normal news. The normal
| news is full of negative sensational stories. I find HN more
| positive and constructive. I still stay up to date with HN but
| view a different angle of attack. We all need a grasp on reality.
| If you are a trader on Wall St. You might get your grasp on
| what's going on in the world via the prices of stocks and
| commodities. HN is another way, I think, at getting a grasp on
| reality without constantly being bombarded with sensational news
| formats.
| choeger wrote:
| I learned about the CentOS 8 story and could cancel a pending
| upgrade. Saved a lot of effort.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I think they changed the algorithm a couple of months ago,
| threads with high user engagement get nuked into oblivion really
| fast nowadays.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The value I derive from hackernews isn't anything like that.
|
| I just read a lot of interesting stuff here in both posts and
| comments that is directly applicable and helpful to my day job.
|
| Actually, come to think of it. I did meet my wife through someone
| I met at a HN meetup.
| 627467 wrote:
| Being a 'low-tech' (compared to most other web destinations these
| days) and text-only sites with some social interactions is one of
| the reasons I come to hn multiple times a day. I sorta learn to
| ignore most things posted.
|
| So benefit: low bandwidth, (relative) low noise news source
| compared to other places
| GolDDranks wrote:
| I realised that software engineering and programming can be a lot
| better compensated than I thought. This has given me some
| leverage to pursue better salary and an idea to land a remote job
| somewhere well-compensated. The latter is just an idea at the
| moment, but I'm thinking of acting on it later this year.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I did get a job from a post on HN: I applied to a "Who is
| hiring?" posting. But I have to say that you and I are looking
| for entirely different things from this site.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I'm here to practice my English.
|
| Language-wise the quality of posts here is much better than what
| I would get on reddit, fb or similar.
|
| Not sure if this counts, but it's a major reason why I visit this
| site daily.
| anvemaha wrote:
| Seconded.
|
| I'm taking a professional reporting course at my uni and I feel
| like lurking here has paid off at least a little bit.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's an odd feature of the thing - I'm a native English speaker
| so I'm ok with that but getting upvotes / downvotes is quite
| good practice for improving your writing, I've found.
| graeme wrote:
| Yes that's actually how I got my start in writing. I had a
| travel blog back in 2007-08 and would post entries to
| Facebook. I gauged writing effectively by comments and
| rapidly improved my style.
|
| Ended up starting a writing focussed business. Don't think I
| could have done it without frequent and rapid feedback.
|
| Your comment made me realize this is probably why I keep
| writing comments. It is constant, precise feedback on my
| skill in what I do.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I only started my "technical blog" (heavy quote marks here)
| after four years of posting comments on HN.
| chalcolithic wrote:
| My first step when evaluating new (software development related)
| technology/product/service is to google Hacker News for it. Great
| value for the time spent. You may try cutting leisure browsing
| time and use HN as a tool.
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