Ask HN: What is the best thing you learnt or got out of Hacker News? Anything that have had a positive impact on your life. |
Ask HN: What is the best thing you learnt or got out of Hacker News? Anything that have had a positive impact on your life. |
For actual technical content Lobste.rs is a superior source though IMO.
Looking over all the old YC projects that ended up being wildly successful, but their HN threads were full of naysayers who are better at sounding smart on the internet than providing actual feedback. Learning to differentiate between that kind of poster and people who have genuine feedback that reflects what users actually want is invaluable.
To be clear: it is a culture issue, not a moderation issue. dang does a fine job of moderating. The problem is that we allow the cheap takes and well-actually’s to both exist and be highly visible via upvotes.
I’m not sure HN at large really wants to fix this, unfortunately. It is pervasive and largely unchecked.
Someone should do a roundup of these kind of posts: the Dropbox announcement, etc
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055)
> This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade.
> Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.
The interesting thing to me was their comment wasn't 'wrong' per se, but just that their logic was founded on that false assessment ("photo service"). In fact, their assessment of the value/success in YouTube's acquisition could have been applied to Instagram (in that it let Facebook access a different type of image-based social sharing).
It's not about the 99% where it works.
It's about the 1% where it loses the info from it's sensors and fails.
It's often providing me with "restore faith in humanity" experiences when I see exchanges in the comments where the worst impulses of humanity are expressed, and someone will respond with an eloquent and well articulated rebuttal to the insanity that society has normalized.
There are also lots of smart people saying really dumb shit on here as other comments have alluded to.
But overall, this is one place that consistently restores my hope that there are other people out there who think like I do and share even a few of my values.
You should try to find meet ups and/or hacker spaces if you live near an actual city. I've been to several countries and have always been able to find those (well, ok, except when I was in rural France with the closest real city a 1h30+ min drive or so).
I've read this site for about 10 years now. The biggest thing is all the random blog posts I wouldn't ordinarily stumble upon. A lot of times, programming problems come up at work, and of course I know all the details of some arcane trivia because of 3 different articles I'd seen on it and different perspectives on it.
The biggest problem is then trying to go back and find which blog article I read. That's impossible.
It's definitely not as bad as carbon monoxide poisoning but it's also much easier to inflict on yourself at least to the point where it can make you drowsy and worsen your headaches.
Whether it is SICP, Conway's Game of Life book, great MOOCs in Coursera or whatever!
My life has been changed by the gems of learning resources shared as submissions and comments.
And not only text or text-like material, the amount of good books I have found in the comments here are better than all other communities combines. I cannot put up a complete list- I found about Neal Stephenson from HN, and Cryptonomicon is in my top-5 novels. I also loved Diamond Age. I learned to meditate with Culadasa's book which I came to know about in HN comments. Not exaggerating, my life has taken a good turn because of meditation. I can spend at least the next five years reading great fiction and nonfiction recommended here.
I also come to know about many mental models, methods, etc. which have made me better.
I was born in a middle class family, and never was poor. But these were all unknown to me. HN has been an equalizer for me.
In case you reply to somebody to explain why they are wrong, start a reply with a positive (nobody is 100% wrong) then tell them what you think they got wrong. It's much more effective.
Similarly, don't be snarky.
Source: observation of a zillion of threads and how they evolved in the two cases, and which ones were downvoted.
I learned about open source and Linux; in time that went from a new hobby to a change of direction in my career.
I learned about startups, and figured I should try since I'm also a genius who can build a great product. It took quite a bit of money and time lost to convince me otherwise.
I found out about the online CS Masters program at Georgia Tech and did that a few years ago, this led to moving countries and getting a job doing AI.
To be more specific, it helps me identify the ways people gets behind some weird idea and maybe why. Same goes for the negativity that someone mentions in another comment, it's the same to me: unexpected reactions that say more about who reacts than about the criticized idea.
Was there a particular thread that discussed this?
It wasn't so much about why any of them did it. That is really personal to each individual and not motivating, I think. More that people have succeeded in doing it was what I needed to see.
Drove home to me that the small groups of people that run all the various countries have their agendas and spats with each other that have little to do with the interests of the populous.
2. Sometimes, the comments are not actually related to the topic itself (just the title), but nevertheless, I find value reading different perspectives in the comments.
* Keeping my finger on tech and its changes
* A tech community
* Off-the-wall things to read
* Ideas for side projects - e.g. implementing lisps interpreters
All of these have got more valuable now that I'm retired and not surrounded by tech peers
... which is?