Ask HN: How did you get introduced to HN? I came to know about hackernews through one of my colleagues. He was giving a presentation and HN was the first thing that popped up when he switched to his browser. Out of curiosity, I immediately googled it and that was my first introduction to HN. |
Enjoyed the range of topics though, so I stuck around.
Somehow ran across a blog post from Sam Altman who seemed like a pretty smart fellow, and soon found he was assocated with YCombinator, both of whom I had never heard of.
HN turned out to be a good compliment to my other efforts at keeping more up-to-date with things outside my area of leadership.
Next thing you know, Sam became President and it looks like YCombinator has indulged in a little experimentation itself.
I sent the results to Paul Graham, who said I should submit them to HN, of which I'd never heard. I did so, and they pretty much sunk without trace, as do so many of my submissions. Even so, I read some more, and stayed for a while.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[1] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HNrj06
[2] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?...
One of my fondest memomries of him was all the days when he would be so excited about something that he’d read that he’d dash up to me and give me a rushed synopsis before class started.
If you change high school to college and hacker news to slashdot this story is familiar.
The first about a place called Hacker News. Poul Graham, if I knew who that was. Oh yes I did. "Startups and Lisp, startups and lisp, but he's written interesting stuff too". Well, I'm still here.
The second about the principal rocket builder: "Peter is such a dynamic and forceful character. He's bound to have some dark side we don't know about". And well, Peter isn't really still here. He's serving a lifetime prison sentence for having murdered and dismembered a female journalist onboard his private submarine last year.
MeFi [0] and OneThingWell [1] are the gems I found in the same thread. Sadly OneThingWell's author took a long break due to RSI. Other forums/communities I found in that thread are/were SA [2], SDF, Barbelith [3] etc.
I guess it was just when I had got access to readily available Internet (before that it was weekly an hour or so in cyber cafes). I had immediately signed up everywhere (there were dozens) and SA is the only I never really got used to, never really stayed there.
[0] https://www.metafilter.com
[2] https://www.somethingawful.com
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20051024234650/http://www.barbel...
I was travelling solo through South/North America back in 2009 and the last leg of my journey was in NYC. I wanted to eat at Momofuko and managed to snag a booking for two. I emailed Jason and asked if he wanted to join me for dinner (I had never met or spoken to Jason prior to this) and he agreed. We naturally chatted about technology, the Internet etc and Hacker News ended up in our conversation.
It was like a tablet before tablets were a big thing, and a web browser and alarm clock and photo frame - that had some apps and a small app store kind of thing.
Whoever made the hacker news app that was supported on the chumby / sony dash - I owe you so much.
I started reading about things I would never have. Started hearing excellent view points and facts and so many things. I read it on the dash almost every night till it got unplugged the last time and I found an HN app in the android thing for a tablet.
I was really interested in learning more about ML and math. I normally run queries like "Best way to Learn X vs ____". Normally, I get a lot of reddit articles. Sometimes quora or stackexchange. But hackernews came up a few times. Was curious and the rest was history
An article came up by George Will about the opioid epidemic. He comes across as highly judgemental, and commenters didn't fail to notice.
One of them was something like ‘don’t under estimate the value of wasting time on hacker news’.
Held true!
I remember when I first visited HN, after an initial bit of confusion, I realized two important things. First, there was no stream to follow...no need to feel like I had to "catch up". Second, I could scan 30 posts in the same time it took me to scan maybe 6 /. posts. The presentation was just so much more clean and efficient.
After about a week, I noticed a third really important thing. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge. I was spending the same time/effort on HN that I had on /. (and mostly just staying in the top 60 posts), but getting much more for it.
That having been said, HN ain't perfect. Probably my biggest annoyance is the prevalence of links to paywalled and/or adblocker-hostile sites. But as far as news selection, I dumped /. just days after coming here and I've never looked back.
That's exactly why I migrated here from slashdot. I read both for a few months and was finding I'd see something on HN and then see the same exact thing on slashdot days or weeks later.
What eventually made me switch completely was the way comments work here don't encourage the inane, offtopic, uninventive, dead-horse-beating karma-farming injokes and references that slashdot and reddit seem to be inundated with[1]. Not to mention I find it utterly charming how often someone else will post something and the author/creator pops into the comments section to chime in "Hey that's me, would love to answer any questions you guys have". Nowhere else like it on the internet I've ever seen.
[1]Not to say I don't occasionally enjoy the occasionally silly comment, but I find the ones on HN to be a lot more tasteful and actually witty as opposed to the rout cookie cutter memes and references that are found on every single tangentially related reddit or slashdot thread that people can think to post them to.