29 ms·

Ask HN: What has HN given you?

• deepaksurti 9y ago
  Through HN (and PG's) essays: - Insight to plan 1 year sabbatical (financially and technically) - Shipped a 3D game from ground up in that sabbatical, learn 3D graphics was the objective of that - Got a scientific developer job as a result of that game, part of which was to contribute to OSS Libraries - Now working as a freelance 3D graphics engineer - Introduced me to Lisp which I have used ever since to learn hard topics - Wrote a 3D asset kit for iOS, which is open source. NONE of the above would have been possible at all without HN (and PG's) essays. Thanks a million!!!
• aj7 9y ago
  By studying posts, I inferred that a majority of AI research was conducted on Nvidia cards, due to software infrastructure, network effects, and switching costs. This stiffened my resolve to hold on to NVDA.
• tek-cyb-org 9y ago
  Food for my curiosity.
• ioddly 9y ago
  Probably the best advice I've gotten on here is from reading 'patio11 and 'tptacek posts on how to bill for consulting work. I don't have a particular comment as they've written it many times over, but it's really changed the game for me.
  • xor1 9y ago
    Do you have links to any of these posts handy?
    • ioddly 9y ago
      There are lots with good advice (worth searching site:news.ycombinator.com tptacek/patio11 billing/consulting/etc), but the main thing is to stop billing hourly, here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880096
• byoung2 9y ago
  I found my current job (since 2015) working 100% remote in the whoishiring thread, and I'm super grateful for that. Besides that, it's been my go-to source for tech and startup news and great (sometimes frustrating) discussions.
• CyberFonic 9y ago
  HN is my main source of up to date news. The technical orientation and relative absence of mainstream "noise" is well aligned with my interests. For example I found out about Golang and Closure by reading HN.
• 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
  A sense of dispair: still no idea which web framework to choose.
  • cloverich 9y ago
    I know this is tongue and cheek but if anyone out there really feels this, there's two good directions to go: 1) Choose _any_ of your candidate frameworks and gogogo. 2) Choose something like golang and learn to bring-your-own-framework. Either way you'll come out _far_ ahead of where you'd be if you'd spent your time just evaluating.
    • Intermernet 9y ago
      Now I'm going to write a web framework in Go called "gogogo" just to really confuse future readers of your reply.
  • innocentoldguy 9y ago
    I would recommend Elixir on the backend and Elm on the front. Or better yet, fishing.
• fnayr 9y ago
  For me the coolest thing about HN is the breadth of experts here for any (even niche) tech field. This allows for in depth understanding of new products (when someone who actually worked on the team making it is here) or calling out conspiracy theories about why some company shut down some product (because they have inside knowledge and can actually explain the reasoning). I can't count how many times I've read 'I work on the team that built that' with some new insights or opinions just sitting nested in a comment chain 4 levels deep.
  • wasx 9y ago
    Agreed. The wide spread of experts who come out and give first hand accounts of the event/product being discussed adds a tremendous amount of value to the discussion on the site. Discussion on this site is by no means perfect but it is miles ahead of the alternatives out there.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • icc97 9y ago
      Coupled with the occasional burn of people who don't realise they're talking with the actual developer/person behind the product
  • trishume 9y ago
    A few of my favourites: Low level optimization - nkurz BeeOnRope dragontamer Programming Languages - pcwalton jordwalke chrisseaton Other people who work on well-known things that comment frequently: jblow (The Witness, Braid) phire (The Dolphin Emulator) pizlonator (Webkit/JSC) I made a web app just so I could subscribe and read all their comments via RSS: http://hnblogs.thume.ca/ http://hnblogs.thume.ca/
    • opportune 9y ago
      I would add Radim (Gensim, Data Science) I was pretty excited when he responded to my comment one time
• nkoren 9y ago
  Made a "who's hiring" post a few years ago, looking for a presumably short-term contract worker. Met the co-founder of my next company. Win!
• hprotagonist 9y ago
  I have a more thorough pinboard.in collection. I discovered attrs here, which really has been very useful.
• psyc 9y ago
  Mainly, early exposure to a wide variety of languages, libraries, and even more obscure projects that I wouldn't have heard of, or not as early. Also, a somewhat wider vocabulary for talking about many aspects of software.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• chris_wot 9y ago
  Lectured at for over 2 years that I knew why I was rate limited. Got told for 2 years that I made “low quality” posts. It gave me a sense on injustice. You be the judge.
  • Cheyana 9y ago
    Post flagged: Low Quality
  • yesenadam 9y ago
    So then why on earth are you still on here?? (rhetorical question) Life's too short. Well, some people seem to just enjoy playing the wronged, misunderstood martyr, for whatever reason.
    • chris_wot 9y ago
      Not much of a rhetorical question, you seem to think you know why I'm here. It's because I personally find Hacker News is quite interesting and insightful. And I have contributions I can make, and the upvotes to most of them seem to show that others think so too.
      • yesenadam 9y ago
        Ok, so yet again you reply in a snarky, downvote-worthy tone. I guess you just don't realize you're doing it. Your first sentence just isn't a nice way to talk to people. It's got more of a YouTube vibe than HN. No, I didn't know why, given that "What has HN given you" just produced a list of angry-sounding complaints from you. And by rhetorical I meant, I wasn't asking a question to get an answer, like usual, but to make a point, to suggest something. I was just going by what you'd written. But it's nice to hear the positive side of your experience, not sure why you didn't write any of that initially.
        • chris_wot 9y ago
          So you responded with a snarky comment starting with a rhetorical comment?
• quizbiz 9y ago
  I rather not try to dig up the best specific opportunity or lesson learned from my nine years here. HN promotes the positive and entrepreneurial mindset necessary to have an impact on the world, however small that impact might be. Paul Graham set excellent example early on. Upward mobility from curious, resourceful, and already successful people deciding to help one another.
• arkis22 9y ago
  I've been through a lot of web communities. HN is easily the most intellectual, respectful, and diverse. The simple reason is that we like to be here! In the same way that it takes a village to raise a child, your understanding of the world around you is drastically deepened by various points of view. I don't expect to find a better village anytime soon.
  • opportune 9y ago
    I'm very curious as to whether there are any other communities on the web that are as generally "high quality" as HN (bonus points if those communities are tech-focused or tech-adjacent). Anybody got any links? To date HN has the highest (consistent) quality of any online community I've encountered
    • chrisper 9y ago
      I'd say Quora is rather good as well.
      • sleavey 9y ago
        Nowhere near as high quality as it used to be though. I stopped my email digest there a year ago.
        • opportune 9y ago
          Yeah I agree with this. I've tried to use Quora before (about 2 years ago) but couldn't get my signal/noise ratio nearly as good as I wanted it to be
          • hutzlibu 9y ago
            It was very good in the beginning. Now it is mostly people trying to show off any way they can. And it attracted too many ... well, let's call them ordinary mainstream people.
    • 9y ago
• distortedlojik 9y ago
  I get to feel very stupid, but in a comforting, always learning way. I have a PhD in HPC and HN always humbles me with the depth of knowledge contained by the community.
• rsoto 9y ago
  It has given me a lot of things through the years: lots of insight both on things I'm interested into as well as things I don't pay much attention to, quite a few interesting articles and entertainment. But the thing it really stuck with me is inspiration: the endurance and obstacles you must overcome to create a new product. The original post on Dropbox[1] had a lot of naysayers: on how the problem is already solved, that you have to install something, that is seems that is a solution looking for a problem, etc. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• tzhenghao 9y ago
  I must say that the HN community has cranked my career trajectory up a notch. Like many commenters here have said, this remains one of the healthier and more intellectual online communities out there. I've learned many more things here than I do during my day job, and it has continued to motivate me to do better every single day.
• omgbananas 9y ago
  I learned about Bitcoin here when it was just a whitepaper, but didn't recognize the opportunity then. A year ago, another user mentioned Monero so I looked into and discovered it's more "bitcoin" than Bitcoin and bought what I could. I'm not a millionaire, but it sure has helped me financially, so I'm really appreciative that I took advantage of that opportunity. EDIT: and for something a little more intrinsic: Everyone's experiences on different things. I've read lots of great comments on raising kids, and hope to take advantage of that shared knowledge when I have a family.
  • kbenson 9y ago
    Tell me about it. I remember when it was single digit dollars, and it was a curiosity, but it didn't hold my interest. Then it was double digits, and I was like, "huh." Then is was somewhere around $40, and I thought "maybe I should get a couple? But money's kind of tight, maybe later." Then it was over $100, and I thought "surely this can't go much higher? This definitely isn't the time to buy." I thought that same thing when it hit over $300, and over $700, and then over $3000, and then when it was well over $15k. I've learned a valuable lesson. I'm far too risk averse to invest in something like this, because I'm still not sure I could convince myself to invest even though it seems to have hit a bottom and is climbing again.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • snowwrestler 9y ago
      I looked at bitcoin very early, when it was pitched as digital currency free from the problems of fiat money. My impression was that the proponents did not understand currency and that bitcoin would make a terrible currency. As it turns out, I was right. But by being right, I missed a huge speculative windfall. While it would have been nice to make a bunch of money for nothing, I don't really have regrets because my decision was sound at the time. I still wonder whether the early bitcoin marketing was uninformed but they lucked out... or if the early proponents knew it was a terrible currency, but that they had to sell it that way early in order to inflate the speculative bubble.
• DanBC 9y ago
  I got a few Amazon gift cards after some of my comments. That's always amazing, and surprising. (And if someone created a cryptocurrency tipping browser plugin for HN (that I can use on Firefox) I'd probably tip people small amounts here and there.) Someone got in touch about books for children and I got some nice recommendations. Someone else got in touch about some work they're doing around mental ill health. It was fascinating, and it gave me some ideas that I wanted to shamelessly steal. I've got an appreciation of the difficulties of building for the modern web, with competing demands from unclueful bosses / clients, vs visitors and users. I still don't quite understand why text can't just be text, or why mobile browsers have such terrible defaults for plain HTML pages. I've got a bunch of useful links and I've learnt a lot. I've managed to smooth out some of the rough edges, I think.
  • kebman 9y ago
    I was really tempted to just post my bitcoin address here .... :p :D
• cdiamand 9y ago
  The first few thousand subscribers to my side project. And tons of great advice on how to improve it!
• thestoicjester 9y ago
  About 6 years ago, I posted an article I wrote about my experience on the app store[1] and somebody (now a good friend of mine) reached out and asked why I wasn't living in silicon valley. Long story short[2] I ended up moving to San Francisco less than a month later and I've been here ever since. That was unexpected. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705440 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424592
• rozenmd 9y ago
  A deeper appreciation for groupthink.
  • PaulStatezny 9y ago
    Is this sarcasm? If not, can you elaborate why? I’m genuinely curious.
    • innocentoldguy 9y ago
      HN is an echo chamber, to some extent. For example, try making valid criticisms against Go or JavaScript and you will be downvoted without explanation. I think HN would be better if it required an explanation in order to downvote something. At least then it would be clear to everyone reading whether the negativity was legitimate or not.
      • innocentoldguy 9y ago
        See what I mean? Hehe. You asked. I answered, with a purposeful example to illustrate, and there’s the immediate downvote. Thanks for making my point, to whoever did.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
      • grzm 9y ago
        Many members find language wars boring. Most are already aware of strengths and weaknesses of various languages. People have language preferences (I know I do), and those vary from person to person. What’s more important is what you’re accomplishing. If you bring up criticism when it’s not the topic of conversation (for example, complaining about the use of JS on a Show HN), people may downvote because it’s off-topic. As for requiring comments for downvoted, search the archives if you’re really interested in more discussion, but those that aren’t interested in leaving comments are just going to leave junk comments if required, and then there would be endless litigation as to what constitutes a valid reason. As the guidelines request, just don’t comment about downvotes. If you’re really worried about it, take some time to review the guidelines and look at the behavior of other comments that are downvoted. Speculate to yourself why they might have been downvoted. Improve your own comments taking that into account. But in general, I suggest just not worrying too much about it.
• yesenadam 9y ago
  Great question. So far.. links to so many interesting websites, books, papers, blogs—mostly linked to in comments and in AskHN. (And then, maybe even more, the sources mentioned in turn by all those.) Way too many really. Already I'm thinking of having a break from here for a while to actually read all those books (have read some..e.g. just the other day got Crucial Conversations thanks to a mention on here, started reading it with my housemate, it's going to transform our lives—at home and work, everywhere—for sure, and already has helped) and to concentrate solely on what I'm doing, rather than the endless stream of fascinating leads on here to new stuff. But I've got more in a few months on here than I would in many years elsewhere. It's fascinating reading the comments too, usually—typically far more than the linked articles. Thanks so much.
  • TheLML 9y ago
    any great books in particular that you would suggest of those you've read already?
    • yesenadam 9y ago
      Oh that's hard to answer, sorry! - I didn't keep a record of which things I got from here or elsewhere, or from mentions in the stuff I learnt about here. Or from searching topics I learnt about on here. And I was checking out everything I could get from "best programming/mathematics books" lists online for a couple of years before coming here regularly. Youtube videos too - e.g. Matt Might's "Winning the War on Error: Solving Halting Problem, Curing Cancer" and Rich Hickey's talks were..elevating; Julia Evans, Doug Crockford I probably heard about on here. I googled quite a few AskHN lists of fav books, books that changed your life, books you wished you'd read earlier, books you wished your co-workers had read etc and looked at anything that sounded interesting. Sorry I can't be more specific. Well, what is great depends on the reader too. Good luck!
• sureaboutthis 9y ago
  Next to nothing. I scan for links and sometimes find one or two to my interest. I might scan the comments to see if the link is being revered or dissed before I visit. If I'm bored, I've made a few comments. Otherwise HN is nothing more than a link list to me.
  • lukevers 9y ago
    What’s your version of what HN is to other people? In the way that people learn about new things, connect with others in various niches, etc—where do you go for that?
    • sureaboutthis 9y ago
      I don't have such a thing. Eventually they all turn into reddit, populated by kids and amateurs and unemployed wannabe programmers. So they are all for skimming only. The last great place to go was Stack Overflow but it, too, is now overrun by redditors and other amateurs and I no longer help out there even though I'm in the upper three percent. There is one forum I still go to but the past year has shown an erosion there as it has become popular among the non-elite tech group. There are some mailing lists which are exclusive but sparsely visited unfortunately. Same with IRC. So its better to be good at Googling and gleaning fact over fiction, not finding a good forum. The same is true of "news". There is no good source for news anymore and you have to do your own vetting, something news editors used to do but no more.
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    Oh come on. You keep coming back. If nothing else, HN gave you something intriguing.
    • Gargoyle 9y ago
      He said what he gets from it- a list of links. I mostly agree. I come here for the links, and HN does deliver some quality links each day. I've lowered my expectations for discussion to "mediocre subreddit."
  • 9y ago
• dkoubsky 9y ago
  Theres a lot of really intelligent people on here. To me, its often more interesting to read their insights and debates on an article than the article itself. HN always introduces me to new technologies and new ideas. I love it.
• rvo 9y ago
  Discovered Dropbox here. Also have gotten many interviews via the monthly who's hiring posts.
  • dotancohen 9y ago
    > Discovered Dropbox here. You've got to check out this new Hotmail thing.
• vermasque 9y ago
  A job that I've had for years and 2 people that I hired via the "Who's Hiring?" threads. Beyond that, a sense of what smart techies are talkin' about via the headlines and some comments.
• foxfired 9y ago
  Well I get to read well thought out arguments against things I firmly believe in. Not just "your idea is stupid"
• sytse 9y ago
  It gave me a job, a company, and a sense of purpose. In 2012 I did a Show HN for GitLab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Today we are 1800 contributors and a company of 220 on a mission to ensure that everyone can contribute.
  • kossae 9y ago
    You have definitely constructed a great piece of software. GitLab has been a godsend for development workflows at our organization, and I’ve been watching it since that same Show HN so congratulations! That’s a very inspiring example.
    • sytse 9y ago
      We did that. Thanks for using GitLab!
      • anoncoward111 9y ago
        I interviewed with Gitlab for a business development position. I enjoyed writing the pre-screen essay questions, but received no feedback. The recruiter yawned through the interview and then provided no feedback as to why I was denied. Perhaps this is par for the course in sales, but what I've learned from HN is that the value of my expected income from poker and stock gambling is higher than from interviewing with startups. Thank you though for running a cool company
        • sytse 9y ago
          Thanks for your comment. We get over 1000 applications a month and we want to make sure everyone has a good experience. I'm sorry to hear yours wasn't. I've asked the peopleops function to comment. We monitor what score people that applied give us, it has improved from a low 3 to a 4.3 out of 5 in January.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
• duck 9y ago
  Beyond learning a lot of stuff that I don't think I would of been introduced to and/or thought about looking for, it has given me 8.5 years of my favorite side-project to date with http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com. With it I've met a ton of folks and the best company to work for that I could of asked for.
  • frenchie4111 9y ago
    Just signed up! Thanks for making cool things
    • duck 9y ago
      Thanks for subscribing! Would love to hear what you think about it after a couple issues.
  • aspHax0 9y ago
    Now that HN has their own weekly newsletter, how does yours compare?
    • dang 9y ago
      What newsletter do you have in mind? There's no official one.
    • duck 9y ago
      As _dang_ mentioned, not sure which one you're referring to? That said, it is doing well and keeps growing. Hit 55k total subscribers this month.
      • aspHax0 9y ago
        https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/newsletter/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/newsletter/ http://ycombinator.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=6507bf4e4c2df3fdbae6ef738&id=547725049b http://ycombinator.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=6507bf4e... Those are the ones I'm referring to. But I'm glad to see there's still some growth on this! I'll definitely subscribe and look into it.
• tyingq 9y ago
  Silly, but some self assurance. I'm mostly anonymous here, so my job history / pedigree doesn't weigh into anything. But, I still manage to be in the middle of meaningful discussion, and contribute something worthwhile here and there. Even got a few thank-you notes over a 2 year period. Tldr: Helps with imposter syndrome.
  • rroriz 9y ago
    For me, its the other way around: I think I'm ok with my job history/pedigree, and when I check HN, it feels like I'm the dumbest person in my area. It seems like I'm not even trying.
    • chamilto 9y ago
      I absolutely relate to this. But hey, knowing that there are other engineers out there feeling the same thing when they read HN makes me feel better. So, thanks.
    • tyingq 9y ago
      I probably should have considered that perspective. To be clear, I often feel behind on my current state vs HN comments. Was mentioning that, for certain topics, I felt like a big contributor. I don't expect to always be on top, but (very) occasionally feeling like a thought leader here was encouraging. Great observation, and appreciate it.
  • bjoli 9y ago
    I feel the opposite, but I am in a different position. I am a hobby programmer. I spend quite a lot of time doing programming challenges (Euler, cryptopals, advent of code) and amateur robotics. Most of the programmers I meet are a result of a shorter non-CS education focusing on getting them employable, which means they know .net and not much more. So far I have only met one person in real life that understood anything of what I am doing, even though I have met several people that make a living coding. Hadn't it been for HN I would believe that undergrad maths from old schoolbooks is actually advanced programming or that moderately advanced scheme macros are dark magic :) Being here is somewhat good for my hubris, but also pretty often makes me realise I could have a career doing programming if my current line of work doesn't work out.
• keyle 9y ago
  HN gives me hopes about humanity every day; while the news give me dispair.
• i_feel_great 9y ago
  I learned what to learn. Reading comments gave me tips on how to improve my skills and experience. So thanks to all the nameless experts out there on HN!
• mywacaday 9y ago
  One of the few places that still makes me go wow. 80% of the time I'll only read the comments for the insights, love the general positivity and sense of wonder that the community brings to a wide range of topics that I would be unlikely to come across otherwise. Thank you all!
• adrian_mrd 9y ago
  A community of like-minded nerds :)
  • pksadiq 9y ago
    > A community of like-minded nerds :) Like minded nerds? No. I disagree[0]. :) [0] https://xkcd.com/309/ https://xkcd.com/309/
    • adrian_mrd 9y ago
      Good point. How about: A community of (xkcd and non-xkcd reading) nerds and non-nerds? ;)
• Rapzid 9y ago
  I learned about an opening at an awesome company that I spent ~2 years at. It was my first flat-ish org experience and I gained an amazing amount of insight into how that works, and after I left the challenges their processes/culture had evolved to address.
• danschumann 9y ago
  I posted something like "I'm a lonely founder, are there support groups?" And got hundreds of comments, and a scholarship to a support group! (Courtesy of Zenfounder)
• noonespecial 9y ago
  When I see tech stories or headlines in mass media that seem important I always jump on over to HN to see what's really up. The commentary here is just invaluable. 10 minutes reading the comments here is worth a hundred mass media news stories.
• specto 9y ago
  Gave me the confidence to apply to a tech company and I got accepted, making a much better living now.
• rch 9y ago
  Two jobs that helped get me where I am now, plus knowledge and entertainment.
• pat_space 9y ago
  Lots of great articles to tweet about
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• anonytrary 9y ago
  HackerNews gives me the freedom to say contrarian things without instantly being down-voted to hell. HackerNews also encourages me to be level-headed and polite. The mods here are mature and are relatively unbiased. I like this one intellectual feed over Reddit's many frivolous subreddits. Does the subreddit differentiation tend to attract low quality mods and users? Probably. But Idk.
  • amygdyl 9y ago
    If contrarian debate includes technical debate, I learned that I enjoy reading the counter arguments for programming solutions that I'd probably not learn about, if for any reason I am by experience or knowledge or style or ability, the longer in tooth or lesser as is inevitable in this Cambrian explosion of the web, if I'm going to instinctively assume that I would take another approach to the similar goal. Learning about the depth and even shallowness of the industry that touches large database installations has been most eye opening, in a good way, to this fifth decade enterprise maven. This, and comparing my experience with start-up in the early nineties, and generally the sheer variety of voices, keeps me returning
• vinrob92 9y ago
  We posted our product, Manypixels (https://www.manypixels.co https://www.manypixels.co) there last week (I wrote an article on how we scaled it to $15k in MRR). The article got on the first page of HN and got us about 50 new subscribers ($10k in revenue)
• neom 9y ago
  I like the smackdown when I'm out of line. Community here keeps you pretty intellectually honest. Thanks HN! :)
• BooneJS 9y ago
  A reading list that I'll never be able to get through. Is there a service that turns reading lists to mp3s?
  • kebman 9y ago
    On the Mac there's already a service that will read texts and PDF's etc. You may have to install similar things on your UX or Windoze computer.
  • sincerely 9y ago
    Do you not read faster than regular human speaking voice speed? (No shame if you do, just curious)
    • BooneJS 9y ago
      Not at all; the opposite, I think. As a new Silicon Valley resident, I spent 2 hours a day in a car and have really been enjoying Audible. A few years ago I found myself using Instapaper-to-Kindle. Now I need something-to-Audible. :/
    • protomyth 9y ago
      Some people like to listen to things while driving.
  • amygdyl 9y ago
    Azure's cognitive services, particularly because you can spend the free development dollars for a start: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech/home#text-to-speech-speech-synthesis https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/sp... I have been very pleased with customer reviews when we used the service to custom voicemail greetings per caller for a call center app, where the client was losing too many tickets to SPAM filters, before we could move them to a new SMTP server. And afterwards, too.
  • protomyth 9y ago
    Which platform are you on? I use a droplet on the Macintosh built with Automator.
• deepGem 9y ago
  While I don't have any direct benefits to enlist, I'm sure there are multiple indirect benefits. I come here, when I am lost without knowing what to do. I'm one of those who reads the comments first and then the articles. So HN acts as a 2 layer curation filter. I came across Andrew Ng's course here on HN and that was an eye-opener, changed my career trajectory. I've learned a lot about parenting, entrepreneurship and startups. I don't live in Silicon Valley, so for an outsider, HN is a good window into SV as well.
• rdiddly 9y ago
  A place to hang out (as it were) on the internet that is... ...connected to the tech scene ...ad-free ...not a "social network" in the usual data-harvesting sense ...slim, fast-loading, not riddled with bloat and bullshit ...not plagued quite so badly as the rest of the society "out there" by certain degenerate tendencies in what passes for discourse ...more interested in ideas and substance than in what color car the ideas and substance drove up in (and other black magic) That's really it - that's enough. I didn't get anything cool like a job, but I know there's loads of info here for that too!
  • el_benhameen 9y ago
    There’s a lot to be said for the “slim, fast-loading” bit! HN is my go-to “is my internet connection at all functional?” web page. And when T-Mobile cuts me off when I run over my data allotment each month, at least I can read the comments.
    • t3rmi 9y ago
      You should get their unlimited(30gb) plan. I've had it for the past year, it's been super good so far.
      • toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Throttling doesn't kick in until 50GB now (T-mobile One).
        • el_benhameen 9y ago
          Hey that’s not bad. I’m on a grandfathered plan that saves me a few bucks a month, but I keep thinking about switching.
          • toomuchtodo 9y ago
            I believe you also get a Netflix subscription included, which saves you an additional $10/month if you're already out of pocket for said subscription. Check it out! Happy T-mobile customer for 18 years.
• indescions_2018 9y ago
  The YC seed accelerator model remains the most effective blueprint for generating startups from ideas. Pay heed to the lessons contained herein. And the keys to the kingdom will lie well within your grasp ;) Also. HN is a phenomenal user experience on Mobile Web (Android/Chrome). Superlative readability. Lowest possible bandwith to informational value ratio. And a never-ending well of mental stimulation and ethical provocation.
  • inteleng 9y ago
    Generally, "highest possible value/bandwidth ratio" would better connote a positive intent. Agreed on both points!
• sukeesh 9y ago
  I did a show HN in 2017 for one of my GitHub projects. https://github.com/sukeesh/Jarvis https://github.com/sukeesh/Jarvis I now have 900 stars, 47 contributors. More importantly, it taught me the open source!
• mynameishere 9y ago
  Nothing. And I've been here forever. But what do you want? It's a message board.
  • rapfaria 9y ago
    It gave you resilience! 2007 account, wow.
  • eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    Seeing an old account being downvoted for being unhappy is sad.
    • eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      ...and here come the downvotes to my comment. Good job HN.
      • dang 9y ago
        It's because you're breaking the site guidelines. Could you please read them and not do that? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• zitterbewegung 9y ago
  That being critical doesn't mean necessarily being mean. Knowledge about a bunch of new things that I wouldn't know. Inspiration to try and do new things. But, most importantly 7000+ pretend internet points and something to do when I'm bored.
  • arca_vorago 9y ago
    Very much this. I am pretty passionate, but I've learned more about civil discourse on hn than just about anywhere else, mostly because of dang. At first I really resisted the non-user approved positivity rule change, but it's forced me to reevaluate how I approach disagreements online in general. (Even in irc) It's also been a place for me to vent a bit as a senior sysadmin, and learn quite a bit about how much I don't know.
    • zitterbewegung 9y ago
      Actually I started being less mean on my criticism because I thought that everyone would welcome the criticism with open arms when I was naive. Instead, now I try to complement people first or point out the good parts and highlight the bad. I found that this started to bleed into my real life and at the end of the day it made me grow as a person.
• mentos 9y ago
  HN has given me confidence in my ideas. I've been able to take risks in my communication with peers and pitch ideas that without HN's upvotes I would have been too intimidated or insecure to share.
• cyberferret 9y ago
  For me - Lots of learning. I live in an isolated area, and work from home alone, so there is a sense of community and sharing of knowledge that is valuable to me. I learn way more about new technology and directions in innovation on here than anywhere else on the internet. Signal to noise ratio is still pretty good. Also like that it is still a pretty civil and respectful community - I know it is hard to ride that fine balance between censorship and freedom of expression, and I think the mods here do a good job under trying circumstances.
• _Chief 9y ago
  Impostor syndrome. jk Without HN, it's impossible to quantity how much tech/dev news I'd have missed out on. Plus, the comments are often even more insightful than the actual posts.
  • neillyons 9y ago
    > the comments are often even more insightful than the actual posts. Agree with that. I often just read the comments. The link is just a discussion topic.
  • swah 9y ago
    Not entirely false though. I do miss coding (actually playing with the computer) as I did in the 90s, alone and without comparing to anyone else, or thinking something was already done and my efforts were futile..
  • itpragmatik 9y ago
    > Plus, the comments are often even more insightful than the actual posts. +1 This is the main reason for me to visit hacker news often.
• p0larboy 9y ago
  Submitted one of my first few article for my web dev blog, colintoh.com, many years back. It hit the front page and it really encourages me to write more until I didn't. Nowadays, the blog is used as both a personal dev resource and a resume.
• hkmurakami 9y ago
  Met a good friend through the site.
• khazhoux 9y ago
  THE go-to place for technical news and reading material every day. Though I do wish people would lighten up. You can't hardly post a joking comment without the downvotes pouring in. Yeah, we don't want this to be a meme palace, but it's ok to kid around every once in a while.
  • SamReidHughes 9y ago
    My joking comments rarely ever downvoted.
    • smoyer 9y ago
      I was so tempted to down-vote you!
      • SamReidHughes 9y ago
        I'd forgive you. You have to be willing to accept downvotes if you want to make a joke. The joke has to be worth it.
• nice_byte 9y ago
  Some posts I saw here inspired me to start blogging myself
• slovette 9y ago
  HN, for me, is all about the comments. I’m always shopping for new perspectives or opinions that I haven’t seen yet that maybe give me a clue on how to do things better. People tend to give a lot of perspective in-between the words they’re writing. How people use, feel about or otherwise think about ‘things’ (products or services). That’s the gold here for me. Learning how people see the obviousness that I also see, but in their own unique ways. Helps me build better stuff.
  • Cytronex 9y ago
    You're missing out. Most of the interesting comments are shadowbanned. Reddit is much better for open discussion. 10x better.
    • nurettin 9y ago
      I'd much prefer HN's scarce supply of armchair commentary to reddit's endless supply of quickly triggered "meme" comments.
    • Kluny 9y ago
      The strict moderation is a feature for me.
      • acct1771 9y ago
        I just wish I could choose to see what was removed, somehow. Do you feel that'd impede on your experience, that being possible? Genuine question.
        • wglb 9y ago
          In your profile, there is a choice called "showdead". If you set that to yes, you see those comments.
          • acct1771 9y ago
            Shadowbanned is not the same as downvoted/dead, unless I've missed something.
• sampl 9y ago
  Six years ago, I saw a job posting on HN—a YC farming startup was looking for a designer. I joined the two founders, moved to Michigan, and learned more about building companies, products, and teams than I ever imagined at the start. I also met a bunch of people who became like a family. Unexpected but priceless. Thanks HN.
• vjeux 9y ago
  Got me a job at Facebook. I posted a weekend project while at school in 2011 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478751 ) and someone at Facebook reached out to me to interview there :)
• chezhead 9y ago
  Since I live in an area that isn't very plugged into the tech world at large, seeing blog posts aggregated on HN can clue me into some interesting technologies -- I started using grafana and prometheus for something at work and it ended up being the right choice that other coworkers would not have figured out. Without HN I probably wouldn't know much about these technologies.
• ridgeguy 9y ago
  I'll dodge specificity and just say I value HN for commentary by thoughtful people who contribute information and opinions on matters that interest me, but for which I have less than expert chops. This covers a wide range of topics. And even in those few domains where I might possibly be an expert, I occasionally get turned around by HN commenters or the stories they submit. That keeps me growing. I'm deeply grateful for the quality of the HN community and to HN for maintaining it.
• garry 9y ago
  I found out about Y Combinator through HN in 2007. The big thing I learned from PG's essays and the links on HN were that I could start a company myself, and that there were lots of smart people like me who had done it and were going to do it. It gave me the confidence to quit and start working on something. The next year I applied and got in with my startup Posterous. We built that to a Top 250 Quantcast site, and Twitter ended up buying it. In 2011 I joined Y Combinator as a designer in residence, then investing partner through 2015. In 2015, I started a $125M Seed VC fund (Initialized Capital) with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who interviewed me in 2008 to get into YC. So I literally wouldn't have done any of those things and probably would have stayed on at Palantir as a software engineer in 2007 if I had never seen Hacker News.
  • sizzle 9y ago
    This is inspiring thanks for sharing
  • da02 9y ago
    What's does a "designer in residence" do? Is that a 9-to-5 job?
• sahillavingia 9y ago
  My entire career.
• gabythenerd 9y ago
  It got me interested in building software. I am currently studying with Platzi, a Y Combinator Company that gave me a scholarship for a whole year to learn about programming, personal branding and startups. It has given me knowledge about interesting topics in the tech world. This has made talking to interesting people a lot easier. This is a little more personal, but it has given me hope of having a better life in the future.
• quickthrower2 9y ago
  It's given me an eye on the tech world outside of my own country, and a sense of opinion on things outside of my immediate coworkers. On the dark side it does give me shiny object syndrome - wanting to read up and know about a lot of things, and some inferior feelings as I see super successful people here, however I am moving on and being happy just to be a guy who enjoys coding, earning money for the family etc.
• theparanoid 9y ago
  Honestly, not much. Mostly, it's reinforced my switch from programming.
  • shitgoose 9y ago
    from programming to what, if you don't mind me asking?
  • innocentoldguy 9y ago
    Yes, I’m curious what you switched to as well.
• hemantv 9y ago
  Nice set of people to chat and comments are especially helpful. Good reading list Made me aware of silicon valley and startup when I was India, now I am here :)
• hux_ 9y ago
  HN used to be a daily source of nourishment. But today it is a source of "informed bewilderment" like everything else on the web. Google the term. Understand it's consequences on you and the people around you.
• adjkant 9y ago
  A daily reminder of how far the tech community has to go socially and morally, and hopefully a chance to help change that in a positive direction.
• justboxing 9y ago
  (mostly) political news-free content, but I'm here mostly for the comments, 'Show HN' and 'Ask HN' posts.
• fogleman 9y ago
  An audience.
  • donquichotte 9y ago
    Hah, just yesterday I have browsed your github again. It's my go-to resource for clear and beautiful C, Python and go code. And Craft is awesome!
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• decision_tree 9y ago
  Knowledge and company for people building knowledge companies.
• kelukelugames 9y ago
  It motivated me to make stupid github projects for Internet points. A couple of them got voted to the front page and one even got flagged killed. Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10968004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10968004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198391
  • photogrammetry 9y ago
    That's pretty neat!
  • zaqplm 9y ago
    I second your pronunciation tracking site. There are often trivial syllable mispronunciations endorsed by a community that if surfaced to the attention make significant improvement in speech clarity. What is more interesting than the not-obvious mistakes(that you cited as examples) is that there is a repetition(pattern) of pronunciation mistakes specific to a group(or all non-natives). For instance: http://ijleal.ump.edu.my/images/volume4/IJLEAL004.SHAK_et_al.pdf http://ijleal.ump.edu.my/images/volume4/IJLEAL004.SHAK_et_al... I would like to make this work.
  • zaqplm 9y ago
    Given the prestige and usefullness of English in many countires, an app that teaches pronunciations seems to me a good idea
• sethammons 9y ago
  I first learned about Go here. It inspired me to learn more about the language. Myself and two others worked to get it adopted at work, where it has become the main language there, which makes my daily life much more pleasant. The other thing HN has given me is a large time sink. I spend far too much time reading comments here.
• sunjain 9y ago
  Best thing about HN are the quality of posts and the comments. No politics, mainly focused around technology and intellectually challenging posts. It gives you idea of technology trends, and how others are handling challenges similar to yours - something equivalent of going to a conference, but without going to a conference. Some of the comments here are even better than the article and when you combine both, you get a complete perspective. You learn not only technology but how to lead people, how to(and not to) run a company based on what/how you absorb from HN. It's the quality of comments that makes it better than any such site/forum out there. I still remember a comment - which was almost equivalent to a dozen books, around why some people are successful - something to the effect that it is not that we lack information, or lack access to information but the fact that our mind is so full of input that we don't act on what we already know we need to do. Very few other places, I've found such thought provoking comments.
  • iforapsy 9y ago
    That sounds like a very interesting comment that I'd like to read. Would you happen to still have the link to it?
    • sunjain 9y ago
      sorry. I don't have that link.. the main post was either about usefulness of internet or about secret behind most successful people in tech - not sure which one precisely.
      • abhishekjha 9y ago
        Any idea about how far back it was?
• Thriptic 9y ago
  It got me into programming. One day I was trying to VPN into my workplace, and I started experiencing network connectivity problems which were very rare. I went on FB and asked if anyone else was experiencing connectivity problems. A friend of mine who was a developer linked me to a post on HN where the service degradations were being discussed. I had never heard of HN and went back to the front page. One of the first links on the front page was a submission advertising the fact that Coursera (which I had also never heard of) was just launching a data science course track which also covered machine learning. I was in pure bio at the time, but I had heard about machine learning and data science at work and thought they sounded very cool but would be unapproachable to someone without a strong math background. When I saw the link, I said "oh fuck yea I should totally look into this!". I checked out the course track, learned basic R, and have never looked back. I've now fully transitioned into development and out of bio :D HN also inspired me to launch my own company, which I never even thought of as an option until I started spending time on this site.
  • miketery 9y ago
    What are the challenges in bio like compared to tech industry interms of innovatation, opportunity, or otherwise? I'm considering transition in that direction.
    • Thriptic 9y ago
      Are you going from bio into tech or tech into bio? Also what exactly are you interested in doing? Both of those domains are very broad.
      • miketery 9y ago
        From tech to bio. Primarily diving into the processes involved with DNA, RNA, and proteins (i.e. following CRISPR hype).
        • Thriptic 9y ago
          If you're interested in dealing with the wet lab side of these processes, the biggest immediate challenges will be amassing the underlying domain knowledge and credentials. Unlike in tech, industry labs care a lot about formal credentials, and it will be hard to find a real research position without at least a masters or PhD in the field. Ignoring credentialing, the biggest challenge is that you're trying to develop products in a space where the systems you're working in are not fully understood yet. This means that there is a lot more underlying uncertainty in everything you work on. You're also entering a highly regulated space if you're talking about therapeutics, which impacts development processes, timelines, and costs. There is a ton of room for innovation in the space and CRISPR is hot new tech, but expect everything to move substantially slower than in tech. If you want to be a developer who works on bio-related problems, that's a totally different story. Frequently developers in bio are not as good as what you would find at a big tech company, so there is very high demand for people who know what they are doing and who also have the domain XP to understand the problems. I would be happy to chat about it more in depth sometime.
• segmondy 9y ago
  Part of my link to the bay area without having to be there.
• petethepig 9y ago
  Gave me a great job that I took 4 years ago after posting in "Who wants to be hired?"[0]. It's particularly a big deal for me because I also moved from Russia to the US as a result, which is something I always wanted to do. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970405
• mooreds 9y ago
  Mostly for me it's a place to highlight interesting writing/content that I feel should be read more widely. It's really fun to find someone's heartwritten article, post it here, and, if it trends, have them mention it excitedly on Twitter. (That's happened a few times.) I also appreciate the discussions, though there are slacks that I'm on that have deeper, more focused discussions. It's also a great way for me to record links that I find interesting, even if they get only one or two votes. (I also auto tweet all my HN links, so it serves double duty.) Finally, I appreciate both the range of the populace (in terms of viewpoint and expertise) and at the same time the lack of fragmentation (as contrasted with the other main internet forum I monitor, reddit).
• jere 9y ago
  About $2800 I guess. I never would have known about Stellar otherwise. Beyond learning a hell of a lot, the most cherished thing was probably finding out about microcorruption. That feels like one of the biggest accomplishments of my life, I finished pretty early on, and it was fun!
• megaman22 9y ago
  Lots and lots of wasted hours arguing with people on the internet. But it has also shown me a wider world, of smart people that have for various reasons interpreted reality to come to wildly different conclusions. This leads me to question my assumptions, and seek the reasons these other people have come to espouse their beliefs. Sometimes I am persuaded, other times there remains a deep gulf of experience or ideology, but in any case, it is instructive. Additionally, there are some members here that are incredibly informative and I love the historical, under-the-covers insight they provide.
  • smoyer 9y ago
    I don't think "smart people" actually do too much "arguing on the Internet". You reach a point where it's "debate" and over time, those arguing from opposite extremes will tend to move towards the middle ground. I personally never lose an argument - I'm either right or I'm wrong and learn something from it. (the reality is that there are snippets of truth embedded in most of my wrongness which is what kept me there to begin with).
• Azeat 9y ago
  Occasionally interesting reading because I'm not a computer programmer or anything of the sort so I don't benefit from the tech job type of discussions or opportunities.
• mightybyte 9y ago
  One of my comments got a job for someone else who I had never met. And it got me a nice referral bonus. :)
• CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
  HN has given me enough cynicism towards Silicon Valley culture to never want to live there, and an appreciation for some of its residents that comment here to believe that conditions can improve.
• rishabhd 9y ago
  purpose, perspective & a penchant for tech in general.
• shitgoose 9y ago
  ever-deteriorating karma.
  • shitgoose 9y ago
    wow. you just had to do it...
• randall 9y ago
  I met one of my cofounders via hacker news, and was accepted into Y Combinator shortly after thanks to this post on HN on new year's eve. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993981 Change the trajectory of my life for sure.
• ivm 9y ago
  – kickstarted my app: at least $12k after Show HN – inspired an idea for a future educational non-profit – lots of insights, especially from non-tech articles I found here
• nsarafa 9y ago
  Besides a wayy better facebook new feed (https://github.com/yczeng/hackernews-newsfeed https://github.com/yczeng/hackernews-newsfeed). A feeling I'm not so alone in my pursuit of learning as much as humanly possible about the world of technology, startups, physics and everything in between
• epberry 9y ago
  A sense of community even while living far from the valley. Thanks HN, don’t ever change.
• westoncb 9y ago
  It was a kind of fuel while I worked at a grocery store trying to build some software that I thought would be game changing (it was a new kind of text editor that would break documents into interactive 'tiles' around grammatical boundaries[0]). Eventually it was on the front page here and I got tons of feedback, most of it good; and while I wasn't fortunate enough to get funding or anything, it's been a big part of why I've been able to get some pretty good/interesting work. And, one day I'll post another project here and the world'll love it and all my problems financial and otherwise will be solved forever and all of humanity will live happily ever after etc. :P I also have learned lots more about programming languages and various other CS topics than I likely would have without HN. [0] http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext
  • spondyl 9y ago
    I also poured over HN while working dead end retail for 3 years. It quite literally sent me into the mental health system. I picked up a heeeap through osmosis, did a dev bootcamp for web dev/JS/React, spend a year being rejected from places, did almost nothing but self study + Github projects at the same time, self learnt Python and it finally paid off this past October with an offer. I started my position as a graduate Site Reliability Engineer this last Monday since it's my employers inhouse program where grads rotate 4 times (ie frontend, backend, mobile) in the first year before settling into a position. Personally, I have 2x 6 month rotations of SRE and Cloud Data and it's very exciting! Come to think of it, I've still been meaning to write a post about all the "junior" positions I was rejected from. It really sucks when you're starting out. One startup who I did a test with, and never got a response, actually went bankrupt earlier this year which was a weird feeling.
• Cytronex 9y ago
  Nothing but grief. I post my opinion here, and I get shadow banned. Every-time. As a developer -contract or fulltime- for the last 30 years, you would think people would listen.
  • ColinWright 9y ago
    > Nothing but grief. I post my opinion here, and I get shadow banned. Every-time. Your assertion is that it happens to you regularly. Have you considered that it's actually you, and maybe there is a way to express your opinion clearly without getting shadow banned? > As a developer -contract or fulltime- for the last 30 years, you would think people would listen. As an intelligent person, one would think you might learn how to adapt your methods of expression. I also know of occasions where people actually asked for advice on what they are doing wrong and got genuinely helpful responses. Perhaps you could consider that. ================================================================ Edit: To the people/person who downvoted - I don't care. I like HN, and I find the comments mostly valuable and the discussion mostly civil. After spending a lot of time on many forums over several decades I've come to the conclusion that this is mostly because of the strong moderation. If people are being shadow-banned here then there will be a reason underneath. They can complain as much as they like, but it's likely that if they don't change then the shadow-banning will continue. If they want to participate, and want not to be shadow-banned, then they need to change their behaviour, and seeking advice is often helpful. So I stand by what I said, and in replying to the tone of the comment by Cytronex, I stand by how I've said it.
    • lolikoisuru 9y ago
      >Your assertion is that it happens to you regularly. Have you considered that it's actually you, and maybe there is a way to express your opinion clearly without getting shadow banned? Since he was already shadow banned for this exact comment and it's his very first with this account I don't think it's on him.
      • ColinWright 9y ago
        > Since he was already shadow banned for this exact comment and it's his very first with this account I don't think it's on him. One of us is mis-understanding things. You seem to be saying that the account "Cytronex" is shadow-banned, but it isn't, so I'm not sure what you're saying. This comment[0] has been downvoted, and that makes the comment display in a light grey, but that's not the same as shadow-banning. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410628
• callmevlad 9y ago
  Nearly 5 years ago, a few months after being rejected from YC and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499). It was our last-ditch attempt to show a proof-of-concept to the world before going back to our old bosses to ask for our jobs back. Thankfully, the post took off - we were #1 for most of the day, and over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list in the several days after that post. This helped us reapply to YC with a lot more confidence and traction, and we were able to get into the next batch. Webflow (https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/) has since grown into a profitable business with close to 1,000,000 users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and close to 60 team members in over 14 countries. I'm pretty sure none (or very little) of this would be possible without HN and the community here, and the super positive reception our post had. Today, we're on a mission to enable more people to create powerful software without having to learn how to code - we probably have decades to make that vision a reality, but we're on a decent start in large part thanks to our launch on HN. A HUGE thank you to the community here!
  • kolinko 9y ago
    A similar story with me and AppCodes. I wasn't struggling, since my mobile app business was already giving ramen profitability (which is around ~1k/month in Poland). I wrote a post onto HN, outlining new features of our service ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693151 ), it got to the front page, and was picked up by TC shortly afterwards. 6 years later, I moved to other projects, but still maintain the site, and the site still brings profits, and has happy users :)
  • rohan1024 9y ago
    Hi, I just signed up for your website and everything looks really good but on your design dashboard I am getting your browser is currently not supported. I am using Firefox 59.0b10. It seems like Firefox is not at all supported. I should not have to switch browser. BTW, Great work!
• reitanqild 9y ago
  Changed my views on drug policies.
• TuringNYC 9y ago
  A place to go for intelligent discussion after Slashdot lost appeal (to me)
  • stevekemp 9y ago
    Slashdot is still limping along, but it hasn't been a site I've visited for many, many, years now. I always feel somewhat nostalgic the rare times, like today, when I'm reminded of it. Slashdot, Kuro5hin, LWN, all used to be sites I visited daily. Now only LWN is left.
• rootsudo 9y ago
  A place to kill time while I debate what I want in life.
• omarchowdhury 9y ago
  An intellectual soil with respect to business, technology, history, economics, and sociology.
• gdiocarez 9y ago
  I'm a drop out from school. All my technical skill are through asking stackoverflow.com. Not until I found hacker news, I got the best tools to use, have a community that supports the site. And overall, I never end the day without opening it.
• nooron 9y ago
  I got my first job out of college through HN at a YC startup. I am still in startups several years later and will be for a long time, hopefully. I am very grateful for the opportunities I've found and cultivated from it.
• gavanwoolery 9y ago
  Aside from all the other stuff, my interactions here have led to some great "real life" friendships.
• tritium 9y ago
  Downvotes.
  • madshiva 9y ago
    or upvote :)
• yters 9y ago
  I like HN because despite the liberal bias (IMO) responses to my conservative views are often decently thought out. Of course I get the down-votes too, but it helps me maintain my martyr complex. Best of both worlds.
  • opportune 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, have you found anywhere on the internet that is both tech-focused and does not have a liberal bias? I'm sure you could find places that lean libertarian, but I don't know of anywhere that I would consider traditionally conservative To add to your point, I feel that the conservative views on this website are also generally intelligent and thoughtful, even though I mostly disagree with them.
    • yters 9y ago
      Yes, the uncommondescent blog is heavily conservative, and science and tech focused. But, in general there is a correlation between tech and liberal or libertarian. But this is because that crowd tends to eschew the time consuming obligations that accompany a lived out traditional conservative viewpoint, which would prohibit one from heavy online participation.
      • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
        I don't think it's about time constraints, there is plenty of conservatism elsewhere on the internet. Possibly it might be age related.
        • yters 9y ago
          There are the Breitbart and Fox News message boards, but that's mostly an older crowd with much time on their hands. The 20-30 conservative crowd is probably busy raising families and being involved with their communities.
          • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
• brianwu02 9y ago
  An introduction to a community that just so happens to be centered around technology. As far as my career goes, it has given me a wealth of perspective on the different tools people are using to solve their problems.
• alexk 9y ago
  I put my name in a co-founder wish-list doc from HN [1] in 2010. Many folks have reached out, some were pitching their ideas and others just wanted to get in touch. One guy, Ev, said that he was going to write a new email server. I thought it was a bit funny (who wants a new email server in 2010?) but pretty cool at the same time so I decided to join. That's how I ended up as a founding engineer at Mailgun (YC W11) and later on co-founded gravitational.com (YCS15) with same folks, Ev and Taylor, my best co-founders and friends from HN. So thanks HN and YCombinator! [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sygd1fhGYRS-ZvRP0IVV6rf3OUyED9_b6Da4tVWdS08/edit?toomany=true#gid=9 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sygd1fhGYRS-ZvRP0IVV...
  • smhg 9y ago
    Great to learn about this. Thanks for mentioning! Do you think it still has the same usefulness? It looks quite chaotic to shift through ~8 years of unmaintained information. Back then I can imagine you could basically contact everyone on the list and see what happened?
    • alexk 9y ago
      I was amazed by how many great people have reached out, I was not expecting that at the time. I think part of it was due to the fact that list was relatively small and time relevant. I think that monthly spreadsheet published in “Who is looking for a co founder” thread will be very useful, especially to folks who have limited access to usual networking events (for example I was in Russia in a city with very small startup scene).
• bad_user 9y ago
  Other than the ability to argue, nothing much, a time waste feeding into our need for affirmation, like most social networking.
• git-pull 9y ago
  HN gave The Tao of tmux a lot of valuable feedback, as well as readers. Here is the Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022062 That day, I got tons of pre-orders. The email notifications kept piling up. Book wasn't even done yet. It's available online for free: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read, and also in DRM-free ebook format: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/ https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/
• mychael 9y ago
  Hacker News reminds me that there are lots of people much smarter I am.
• terrywang 9y ago
  - high quality information & comments (including famous people that I'd never meet in person or have a direct conversation/discussion) - passion for technology - probably the current job plus an once in a lifetime IPO experience - a lot more ;-)
• natecavanaugh 9y ago
  This is incredibly modest in comparison, but HN has given me a great understanding of just how smart people can be on any side of any issue, as well as a desire to try to contribute in some way to that dialogue. For me, when IRL it's incredibly hard to find, this has been a much needed boon to my overall view of the world at large :)
• minimaxir 9y ago
  When I joined Hacker News in 2012, it was after a lot of reservation, as I wasn't a uber-programmer with a CS degree and wasn't sure I could contribute properly to the community. In the many years since, Hacker News gave me the motivation to improve both my writing and my technical skills, and gave me confidence in my work.
• agotterer 9y ago
  I believe it was sometime in 2008/09 I attended the first meeting of the NYC HN Meetup in Madison Square Park (pretty sure the meetup is now dead). I met a lot of amazing people from the NYC tech scene that I still keep in touch with. We've helped each other start companies, find jobs, build things, and create lasting friendships outside of work / tech. I miss those days...
• frakkingcylons 9y ago
  I got my first paid internship through a Who's Hiring post almost four years ago (March 2014). I'm so happy that I was able to break into this industry, the financial stability and benefits have given me a new life.
• cyanbane 9y ago
  absolutely nothing directly. but * besides pretty much the first five pages I hit every morning. * a positive feeling towards the future because even though I may not understand every link on here, there are people that do. People that devote all of their time toward one thing small or big and that is a cool feeling knowing that people can make a living and follow their passion. If that's a startup that their only goal is to cash out and drive fast cars or their goal is to eat ramen every night and contribute to those less fortunate people. ALL OVER THE WORLD. * a place to keep up with all the new things in my domain. Stuff I would never hear about on other sites. * a broader sense of news. I know a lot of people don't like that not "hacker" articles get posted here, but I personally love it. I can't stand hitting much of the current news sites anymore and I enjoy seeing stuff pop up on here occasionally.
  • dang 9y ago
    (I fixed the whitespace formatting on your post. Hope that's ok. Bullet lists are kind of hard to get right in HN markdown.)
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• intrasight 9y ago
  One day less of available work time every month. That is until I discovered "noprocrast".
• taurath 9y ago
  A sense of anxiety and an increase to my imposter syndrome despite having very good personal skill set increases every year
• alexbecker 9y ago
  I found my first software engineering job through an HN hiring post by a YC company. It was at a time when my life and resume were... not great. But I could code, and that was enough for them. It was the only offer I got. I became a software engineer, moved to the bay area, and my life turned around. That company had its issues and I did not stay very long, but I would not be where I am today if it weren't for that post.
• nyae 9y ago
  Ask not what HN has given you, but what you have given HN
• jkuria 9y ago
  A four month six figure consulting gig. Thanks HN.
• flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
  The solace in knowing that true discourse need not be confined to real life situations! People can speak in a civilized manner on the internet.
• wcr3 9y ago
  A small, dingy window into the world of dyspeptic 40+ y/o's. And a few good reads, here and there.
• axaxs 9y ago
  Why I like HN: I get caught up to date on newest tech news, the community is the absolute best, and includes many people famous in tech history. It's not the echo chamber of SV but more libertarian. And people will debate you without namecalling, politics, or downvotes. It's like reddit for adults, and I pray it always remains that way.
• subcosmos 9y ago
  Hope <3 This is vague, but I love this community. I expect that in the future we will accomplish amazing things together.
• happyguy43 9y ago
  This meta post violates HN guidelines per dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16370081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16370081 This should be taken down
• michakirschbaum 9y ago
  An echo chamber to bolster my own paranoia and disconnect from reality.
• thinkingslow 9y ago
  Met the co-writer of my book on Hacker News which changed my life! (Was a book on growth hacking that we first talked about on here) Http://secretsaucenow.com - the book Austen Allred - the man
• Walkman 9y ago
  It changed my life. I found edw519's free ebook and after reading it, I jumped out of bed and learned Python. He wrote that you don't need a university degree to be a programmer. I believed that and I will be a senior developer soon. Never been happier in my entire life, really!
• gandutraveler 9y ago
  It made me quit other social networks. I realised how much time I was waiting on FB and other networks without any added value to life.
• dotancohen 9y ago
  > What has HN given you? You mean aside from the education, and the aquaduct, and the wine, and keeping the peace. Oh, and the roads go without saying.
• RobertRoberts 9y ago
  A place to discuss a technology related (generally) topics with mostly sane and rational people. It's a joy to post and communicate here. Edit: And it's a great place to find tech related news I care about. :)
• mindcrime 9y ago
  It's hard to nail it down to anything specific, but I've gained a sense of community from interactions here, and have learned a lot from other posters comments, and from the many awesome links that have been shared here. The HN community is such a big part of my life that when I had a heart attack a few years ago[1], one of the first things I did when I got to the recovery room was post to HN. Of the people I wanted to talk to in that moment, a bunch of strangers, most of whom I'll never meet IRL, were near the top of the list (to be fair, I did call my mom, my dad, and a few close friends first!) I've also gotten a handful of emails from people commenting on or discussing comments I've left here. Those are always appreciated. Also, as others have mentioned, I would say that PG's essays have been very influential to me. The famous "How To Not Die"[2] one is one of my favorites. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315 [2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
• zintinio5 9y ago
  Coming from an under-represented demographic in technology, Hackernews has really been my insight into the industry and helped me immensely with figuring out how to get into it. Reading this website has honestly made me a ton of money and steered my career. On the job, I think Hackernews also keeps me sane by stimulating continuous learning each and every day. I really like this little community.
• shujito 9y ago
  I've found mostly interesting things, very interesting things; and articles and readables to feed my thirst for knowledge.
• ArmandGrillet 9y ago
  Everything. Got my current job by helping someone on HN, got the motivation to go abroad by reading HN, inspired weekly by HN articles and comments. Seriously, internet without Hacker News would suck. The community, administration, and ranking of the articles are just great to keep up to date with the tech field.
• Retroity 9y ago
  I'm fairly new here, but I've already fallen in love with the fact that there's all sorts of interesting discussions going on here, allowing you to find other's perspectives presented in a well written and respectful manner.
• tiuPapa 9y ago
  Inspiration...? I am quite new, have been learning to program less than a year. And posts, comments on HN, even on this post itself gives me the confidence to believe that I too make awesome things if I work hard, something that I crucially lacked in my life until now.
• sunwicked1 9y ago
  - A sense of community - Knowledge - A little less boredom :)
• m0th87 9y ago
  It gave me a spectacular job (CTO of a 150-person YC company) and several job offers. I also hired quite a few engineers through HN. HN jobs (both the YC job postings and the monthly threads) really work! It's no exaggeration to say the site has shaped my life.
• mindfulplay 9y ago
  The idea that startups are not for the few with the richest connections but anyone with the will and drive. Thanks HN!
• mxschumacher 9y ago
  outstanding signal to noise ratio and insightful comments. I read HN every day
• exception_e 9y ago
  Open source connections!
• minibob 9y ago
  https://is.gd/JB9Ilr https://is.gd/JB9Ilr
• rado 9y ago
  Good advice.
• tajen 9y ago
  In 2011-2013, HN gave me the necessary understanding of business, enough that I confidently quit my employer and created my own online app. I call HN my « rogue MBA »: - Major: Patrick McKenzie - Minors: Non-factual knowledge, just a deep understanding of what is to be expected when managing a business, good and bad patterns, dozens of failure reports from other startups, why seed money isn’t necessarily a good thing and the mere existence of bootstrapping, HN gave me an intuition that is hard to describe but lead me to success. - And with HN I have a better source of news than IT journalism, which is often 1 step behind, has their own interpretation and doesn’t have multiple points of view like the comment section on HN. I spent 2 years reading before my first comment, because I didn’t feel legitimate commenting before creating my own startup. Now I’m a CEO ;) Thank you HN.
• MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  HN told me that the world is larger than I thought and that I don't know that much about it.
  • MichaelMoser123 9y ago
    ... also HN seems to have developed a peculiar ranking system - in fact any system of communication gets a ranking system. It seems that hierarchy is part of human nature, isn't it?
• eggie5 9y ago
  2 jobs
• newnewpdro 9y ago
  A bad habit.
• kvz 9y ago
  We shared news about our open protocol for resumable file uploads tus.io and on a few occasions this hit the front page. We haven’t done anything else to “market” it and so I’d say this was the single thing that gave it traction and turned it into a success. Vimeo rolled out support for it in production last week and we couldn’t be happier and more thankful towards HN as a platform to discuss our inventions
• sunstone 9y ago
  HN gave me a hellbanned ID after my first half dozen or so comments. It's been reversed now but I have no idea why it happened in the first place or why it was revoked thereafter.
• movetheworld 9y ago
  A few years ago a colleague of mine showed me HN. It was like a new world was opened to me. That may sound exaggerated, but it really felt great to always read about top stories and innovative project here first. In that time - when android was young - I made a little app for generating passwords. I put it in the play store as an purchasable app without any marketing what so ever. It got no downloads so I stated that in another HN thread and some HN stranger bought the app and gave it a 5-star review, just to help me out! That made me really happy and grateful, I won't forget that, thank you, HN folks!
  • ahelwer 9y ago
    Your phrase "it was like a new world was opened to me" really took me back. Before "the orange website" cynicism, before disillusionment with technology, before deciding startups were a tool to exploit engineers. I remembered finding HN in university - this weird non-web-2.0 website - and learning there was so, so much more to know outside of the narrow computer science curriculum. Things I first heard about on HN include: * TLA+, now one of my main extracurricular technical interests * The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, kicking off a tour of philosophy that seemed like simple intellectual exploration until I needed it most * Conflict-free replicated datatypes. I loved their mathematical purity, noticed the CRDT Wikipedia article was a stub, decided to write it, and so got back into editing Wikipedia. These plus countless other things I don't recall, some of which permanently joined my amalgamated pool of knowledge and influence me in ways I don't even know.
• lolikoisuru 9y ago
  HN has given me a bigger disgust for tech than I thought I could ever have.
• peterbecich 9y ago
  It made me aware of Scala.
• dtzur 9y ago
  Irritable bowel syndrome
• koopuluri 9y ago
  In 2016, I came across a Show HN for a laptop powered by your Android phone (called Andromium at the time, now Sentio). I thought the idea was amazing, went over to their office, met one of the founders, and the other soon after. They gave me a shot working for them in a partnerhips / growth role, even when I hadn't had any experience doing that kind of work before, but had a strong desire to learn. Can't express how grateful I am to have met that bunch and worked with them for almost a year. So much learning. Lifelong friendships. And I was able to see from up close the challenges of delivering a hardware + software product from both engineering and a distribution standpoints. Definitely influenced my current path. I’m working on a product now that I’m excited to ShowHN in a few weeks. Back in my 2nd year of college, when I first found HN, I was inspired by many cool projects that were posted here. Within a year, I decide to take the plunge to build an app from scratch. Ended up taking a lot longer than I had thought (didn't realized how complicated a simple looking app could be), so I skipped a semester and continued to work on it with a friend. It was a great learning lesson that gave me the confidence to try and build out ideas when I had them and see what would happen, rather than just sit around hoping someone would build things that I would want to use. Lastly, I admire the culture here that focuses on creating actual value and doing things rather than chasing status. That has been a huge influence for me - as someone who was very influenced by social pressures and craving for status during high school, and early college (e.g. getting into a top college, getting a job at one of the “top” 5 tech companies), I believe I’ve slowly shifted towards valuing actual work that creates value for others in a meaningful way and caring less about other proxy symbols of “success”. I have a long way to go, but I’m grateful to have been exposed to thoughts and a culture that pointed in this direction, during a time when my mind greatly craved the opposite. Thank you.
• lee101 9y ago
  most of our traffic and customers for our cryptocurrency trading stats dashboard and prediction engine https://bitbank.nz https://bitbank.nz come from hacker news Lots of interesting discussions and learning materials just like this post here allow learning from great people and can sum up to have a great benefit on your life/career
• dcl 9y ago
  A gigantic inferiority complex
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    I feel you. For any given subject there are 140 people who are an order of magnitude better/more skilled/smarter than you, and can make much better points in with less text. On the other hand, remember the saying: "Aim for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll end up among the stars." I keep consoling myself that it's not just about having the most stat points in a single skill. There are projects which can only be accomplished by jacks-of-all-trades, or people who are knowledgeable about several domains. But it requires good self-knowledge. For example, if you have an analytical mind, like animals, have a sense of aesthetics, and patience, you can excel at Origami.
    • smoyer 9y ago
      But here those 140 people will provide deeply insightful answers to your questions.
  • dang 9y ago
    I know the feeling. But there may be an illusion in it. People are more likely to post on topics they know about, so the posts here tend to represent their high points. (There are plenty of low points as well, but when you're vulnerable to feeling inferior, those don't register.) If you only look at the high points of a large enough group, it's going to seem overwhelmingly superior.
  • jcadam 9y ago
    Fortunately, the crowd on HN is definitely not representative of the quality of software developers in the general population. If it were, I would be unemployable :)
• tuxxy 9y ago
  Gave me my current job at NuCypher (YC16). I'm doing some cryptographic engineering and building a decentralized KMS. Honestly, it's the coolest and most fun job I've had to date and I couldn't be more happy with where I'm at. I got it all because I was browsing HN while eating some food. :)
• quillo 9y ago
  A job, doing what I love, with conditions I never dreamed possible for someone with poor formal qualifications but an insatiable desire to learn and prove my value. I am grateful.
• glangdale 9y ago
  A taste for n-gate
  • henesy 9y ago
    This is the real answer.
• tevlon 9y ago
  1,5 years ago, i was suicidal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051611). 1 week after posting this. I got a visit from the police. Apparently, someone gave them the ip and it took them a week to locate me. They wanted to take me to the hospital to check if i had mental problems. Of course they couldn't force me to go. I assured them that i would fix my problems and make a therapy. It was a wakeup call for me. Fast-forward to now: I am working in an e-commerce company in switzerland. I almost have no debts (last payment in may 2018) and my coworkers are like family to me. My life turned 180 degrees. THANK YOU, STRANGER i owe you a lot!
  • MrJagil 9y ago
    What a story! Though I am not depressed, I find myself extremely frustrated with a performance-obsessed society at the moment. I go to one of the most prestigious schools in my country. That should feel like an accomplishment, but I am now surrounded by people "better" than me. It's inspiring, but it also demolishes your ego, from time to time. Last night I had a dream of becoming true friends with a colleague that i idolise. Upon waking up, I realised that the women that I love, sleeping next to me, should've been the one occupying that mind-space, and i suddenly felt pathetically insecure.
    • tevlon 9y ago
      I feel you man. I was a student at the swiss federal institute of technology (ETH Zürich). I was fine 2 years ago. Had a nice swiss girlfriend but my mind was obsessed with becoming a prestigious scientist. I worried too much and lost her. It was one defining factor of my depression. You should give her a hug and tell her how happy she makes you ;)
    • stealthcat 9y ago
      Seems like me. I am studying in Tokyo, Japan. The pressure is so high as I am surrounded by highly-intelligent and hard-working people around me. The machine learning research for Master's degree here is somewhat equivalent to PhD level in my home country (I am from Southeast Asia)
    • 9y ago
• ndh2 9y ago
  By the way: Props to dang for making all this possible. HN is very lucky to have him.
  • dang 9y ago
    Props to pg for making all this possible. But thank you.
• lotsofcows 9y ago
  Procrastination.
• lug0r 9y ago
  HN gave me a link to a Bitcoin-Article back in June 2016. Well, i got intruiged and gave it a chance. Thank You HN!
• montrose 9y ago
  Incidentally, thank you for asking, jxub. It must encourage the mods a lot to read stories like the ones I've read here, and being a forum moderator is ordinarily among the most thankless of tasks.
  • jxub 9y ago
    You're welcome ;)
• tarruda 9y ago
  It indirectly funded my work on a personal project - Neovim - for nearly two years. The work was actually funded through bountysource, but without the momentum gained by my post HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278214), which stayed in the front page for more than 12 hours, the bountysource campaign may not have been successful. HN had a major impact on Neovim being a successful open source project.
  • haySwim 9y ago
    I'm a very happy Neovim user, what could I do to become a very happy Neovim contributor as well?
  • stfwn 9y ago
    Thank you for your work! Neovim was really the first tool that got me hooked on the CLI. It led me down a path that really paid off in terms of how much I learned: about using nvim, customising it with a dotfile - a skill that turned out to generalise really well-, then about version control from the command line, learned to use Docker because it seemed useful to Dockerize nvim at the time (?), I rented a VPS to be able to run nvim on a tablet, well then I had to learn about the structure of Linux.. It just went on and on, and it's still going on! To most here on HN these are elementary skills, but you have to start somewhere. And I started with Neovim. Thank you!
• Shivetya 9y ago
  a mostly politics free zone where interesting technical news and odd but also interesting subjects could be discussed as well as expanded upon by people who are good in the associated field. I still think politics; especially US; appears too much. Some stories submitted are little more than hit pieces but fortunately flagging does help
• artemisbot 9y ago
  Introduced me to CyberChef (https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef) which has since become the open source project I contribute to frequently.
• mrmondo 9y ago
  1) News of new and potentially disruptive products and ideas. 2) The opportunity to read to insightful comments rather than always being sucked into flame wars. It’s not always the case but it’s more pro-constructive feedback and commentary than reddit, forums etc...
• andrea_sdl 9y ago
  3 years ago I was reading HN, wondering what could be improved in my work. I felt a little bit of burnout but nothing that extreme, yet I wasn't satisfied. I remember that to me the solution was remote work. I dreamed of it and coming from Italy it seemed like an impossible request. I had this idea that even though our job might be good/great, our life isn't defined by our job. I still think this today. Our life is what we do after our job. Friends, family, travels. In one comment a guy discussed the benefits he gained moving from the 9-5 job, to a part time job. I thought about it for a couple of months and decided to give it a go with my boss. It went well, and even though I'd love to have the flexibility of remotework right now I'm really happy about this choice. To me nothing is comparable to being able to spend more time with the people you love. Side effect of it: some other coworkers started evaluating part-time job as a possibility to increase their quality of life, which is amazing :)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• paule89 9y ago
  I read about the new Raspberry Pi Zero here first. And was able to buy it directly, to receive the first batch and had not to wait 2 months before the next batch was available.
• RoadieRoller 9y ago
  Freshdesk/Freshworks (Series F, $149M Total) CEO, Girish Mathrubhutham, has penned down a memoir of how a comment on HN has enabled him start his startup journey. https://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-comment-on-h-0/ https://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-...
• gkya 9y ago
  I've had tiny conversations with people like Alan Kay and Walter Bright here. Now, I'm a humanities undergrad living in Istanbul with a soft spot for programming and computers, so without something like HN, this sort of interactions were impossible. HN is bustling with domain experts and very smart people, lots of experience, just the best kind of guys to rub shoulders with.
• bewe42 9y ago
  Access to an incredibly thoughtful bunch of minds which I doubt I could have had otherwise. Many new ideas and helpful advice. However, it also is also my number one excuse to procrastinate.
• Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Daily distraction from work, :p. But at the same time, I learn something new - probably several somethings - every day; new technologies, expertises, etc. Not much I'd use in my day to day job, but it's enough for me to have a basic understanding of a broad range of subjects. Keeps me up to date, so to speak.
• nottorp 9y ago
  All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us? Sorry, it was the only thing i could think of when I saw the question...
• antirez 9y ago
  HN is the nearest thing to a tech community you can have if you live in a place where there is no much IT scene. This site allowed me during half of my career to have somebody interested in the things I care, to talk, exchange ideas, and read very smart things from random nicknames that often I wish I could know in person.
  • ultrasounder 9y ago
    Thanks a lot for Redis!!!
• adammcnamara 9y ago
  Community. Inspiration to pursue big problems. Inspiration to always be learning.
• lorenzop 9y ago
  anxiety
• roryisok 9y ago
  An experience of a community that is respectful, mature and is one of the few places on the internet where I read the comments, and don't feel ashamed of humanity afterwards. It's also linked me to all kinds of interesting tech I would otherwise have missed, which in turn, indirectly, helped me get a new job last year. I probably never would have bothered learning Vue.js if there wasn't such a buzz around it on here, and I got a job out of it. Lastly, HN has made me nervous of using the word 'electron' in a sentence
• Dowwie 9y ago
  HN is a watering hole for well intentioned smart people. I have learned a lot from the community and try to give back.
• newscracker 9y ago
  TL;DR — It's my daily dose. I come here for the variety of content and the discussions. I very much admire how some people here write and put forth their thoughts (the thoughts themselves are so valuable). I also like how this forum of probably hundreds of thousands of users is polite and maintained that way (wish I could do that elsewhere), and would love to pick the brains of the moderators sometime. ----- a. Several years ago, I used to follow a handful of tech sites on a daily basis. When I discovered HN, I still used it to go straight to the articles/headlines that interested me, never looking at the discussions here. Later, I switched to looking at the discussions, and now the discussions are where I start at everyday, and it's only after checking out the discussion that I decide whether to visit the linked site or not. b. I don't follow all the discussions here, and I do wonder how, with HN's primitive interface, people keep up with nested comments and replies. So I don't look at nested comments below two levels or so, and instead use the comment collapse button ([-]), which for some reason appears only on desktop browsers, to collapse comments and check the high level ones (this also means sometimes missing valuable comments that may be in the replies). c. I also end up wasting a lot of time because of HN (yeah, I know about the profile options) and the links posted here. d. On the negative side, there are some topics that I do avoid discussing here because even the most liberal minded/rational people have some limits (please don't ask me about this).
• bouk 9y ago
  On HN I saw this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4156478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4156478 (you can see my comment on it too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157074) Through that I contacted the author, we became friends, hung out at the IOI, and eventually he referred me to Shopify, where I've worked for the last 4.5 years. Because of that I also lived in Canada for 3.5 years. Quite a ride.
• iampoul 9y ago
  25 karma and rising xD
• mayurpipaliya 9y ago
  The way each one of you are changing the world, and sense of intellect our community has is incredible. I learned a lot by just reading through conversations here and in many other threads over the time. HN is helping me become better version of myself. Thank you to each one of you!
• stuaxo 9y ago
  Contributed to my internet / procrastination addiction. But in amongst the many things I've read about that are essentially wasting time, there have been some interesting tech too.
• HipstaJules 9y ago
  It's my version of the the silicon valley since I'm in another country. I love it
• rodolphoarruda 9y ago
  It showed me that there are other worlds beyond LAMP boundaries. It also gave me new parameters for procrastination. LOL
• EliRivers 9y ago
  The insight that a great many programmers, probably including myself, consider their particular tiny tiny tiny subsection of the programming universe to actually be the most common case by a large margin. As such, I let "nobody needs X" and "everyone should use Y" and "why does Z even exist" comments slide off me, except in the cases where I can genuinely help someone expand their horizons.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• madshiva 9y ago
  that american only see thought american eyes, but I already know that before HN.
• zubairlk 9y ago
  It has broadened my horizons immensely and enabled me to think differently about various problems
• randomsearch 9y ago
  Hearing about the latest tech just before my students mention them, so I at least vaguely know what they’re using to build their projects. This occurs uncannily often.
• HenryBemis 9y ago
  "What have the Romans ever done for us?" In all seriousness now, it helped me become an amateur dev (1 app in Apple store, 2 more on the way) and opened my mind to design principles, color selection, and many more. Plus it keeps my mind sharp with both interesting articles/posts but MORE important, with the dialogues/comments. Truly positive and intelectually stimulating.
• nailer 9y ago
  A business, a fulfilling job and some really happy customers! At the beginning of 2015 I was waiting three weeks for GoDaddy to verify my company for an EV HTTPS cert. I spent 6 weeks coding a very minimal version of https://certsimple.com https://certsimple.com - it launched on the front page of HN on March 16th https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908, got it's first customers on that same day and has become my fulltime career for the last 3 years.
• destraynor 9y ago
  We launched Intercom right here on HN and while I wouldn't say "the rest is history", I'm sure most folks here know the rest. Fun fact here was our first post on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2718354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2718354
• sevensor 9y ago
  The opportunity to develop perspective and taste when it comes to programming languages, libraries, and paradigms. I read "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?" for the first time because it gets posted to HN every couple of months (the mods should automate it at this point.) I've seen a steady drip of interesting discussions about and debates among proponents of lisps and statically typed functional languages -- and at the same time I witnessed the fall of Rails and the rise of one hot Javascript framework after another. If it weren't for HN, I'd still be blaming myself for not doing OO right, instead of coming to understand that OO is metaphor rather than science.
• known 9y ago
  I extensively use HN to do http://www.netmba.com/strategy/swot/ http://www.netmba.com/strategy/swot/
• jacquesm 9y ago
  HN has made me a much better writer. So thank you all for that!
  • swombat 9y ago
    All that time spent arguing with me wasn't wasted after all!
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      Fancy meeting you here. Was just thinking about you yesterday. Email inbound :)
• gigatexal 9y ago
  A job. Applied to a position posted at the who’s Hiring and will be starting soon.
• thomasfl 9y ago
  HN has given me hopes and dreams about 10 years. I have not yet created any unicorn company. But I have quit my job and started doing software development as a freelancer.
• jressey 9y ago
  Learning about Ethereum when it was dirt cheap so I bought a bunch @ $20. Giving me confidence to quit my job and move to a new city without one (I now have the best job of my life).
• numbsafari 9y ago
  I've used HN to hire 4 engineers (mostly junior or mid-level) at three different companies (one startup, two growth-phase) in two different states (Maine and Pennsylvania).
• bane 9y ago
  About 8 or 9 years ago I was coming out of megacorpland into a software startup where I was hired as a principal, payed mostly in options etc. I was terrified and really had no idea what I was doing. I accidentally happened upon HN one day and ended up lurking for something like 4 years -- the information content was so compelling. Not even just the tech news feed, but the comments were a treasure trove that provided so much context and guidance that I needed to help understand what exactly it was that I was trying to do. In a sense it provided too much information as I started to develop mental models for how the business should be working, and started to measure us by the information I learned from this community. We managed to grow pretty rapidly, then like many startups went out of business all of a sudden. But the long perspective HN gave me made me not feel as bad about it as I might have. Instead I took what I learned, became a hard negotiator, and with the skillset I learned from crashing a startup into the sea excelled at my next megacorp job, then my next startup job, and now sit in a great position for a medium sized R&D firm. HN provided the context and perspective that really enabled it all and for that I'm forever thankful. These days I mainly use it to keep on top of the shifting sands of tech trends and find that just by reading HN every day for 20-30 minutes I can usually keep up or a bit ahead of my technical staff in a fairly broad swath of areas. Which is nice because I don't really have the time these days to do it all myself.
• Kagerjay 9y ago
  absolutely nothing directly Indirectly, I come back here usually everyday for the following reasons - Experts debating on topics with each other provides useful insights on technology / industry trends, so I understand what things matter and what things do not. - Keep up to date with new emerging technology / practices - Some interesting project ideas that I star on github to revisit later - Show how little I know when I read an article and have no idea what its talking about. Also, it helps expand my technical vocabulary
• losteverything 9y ago
  The joy of reading (comments) Duckduckgo A feeling of elite-ness as not one other person i know (jobs, family or patrons) have ever heard of HN. It's my exclusive ivy-league braggard self worth identity
• benbristow 9y ago
  Some interesting links to click and discussions to read when I'm procrastinating.
• kin 9y ago
  I joined in college and HN has always been a leading indicator of technology for me. At first I was a lurker and around 2009 all I saw were articles on Rails and Bitcoin. Fast forward 5 years of time wasted by a young adult and Bitcoin becomes a missed opportunity (I know, still wasn't, but how could anyone know for sure?) meanwhile Rails hype plateaued here on HN. Anyway, now anytime there's heavy mention of anything, I do my fair share of due diligence and have been a lot more successful because of it. Thanks HN!
• spython 9y ago
  HN got me into dancing. Around five years ago there was a thread about books that changed your lives. Someone wrote about Impro by Keith Johnstone - an introduction to improvisational theater interspersed with a lot of personal stories. I read it and fell in love with the honesty and the new view of social interaction the book offered. I found a dance theater studio near me - the closest thing to impro theater that was available - and went there. It was there that I met some of my most important friends and developed practices that I use to this day in my artistic projects as well as in interaction design. Thanks, unknown HN user!
  • amsilprotag 9y ago
    What a coincidence. I just started reading and bookmarked the archive.io of Impro yesterday after seeing used copies on Amazon starting at $25. I'm assuming it's out of print? https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-KIkLrSPi_3lzPl5v/Keith%20Johnstone-Impro_%20Improvisation%20and%20the%20Theatre-Methuen%20Drama%20%281981%29_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-KIkLrSPi_3lzPl5v/Keith%20Joh...
    • spython 9y ago
      The 2007 reprint is available in Europe for around 12 Euro, and libgen.io has an old edition as pdf.
  • ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    "an introduction to impro theater interspersed with a lot of personal stories" seems like a technically accurate but misleading description of the book to me. I struggle to capture the essence of the book, but I'd add that it shows a lot of insight into creativity, relationships, and the human condition.
    • spython 9y ago
      You are right, and it is indeed quite hard to describe this book. It is less monolithic, more like a collection of short stories each offering unique insight into a topic. Here is one of my favorite stories from the book: https://books.google.de/books?id=j0n2DAAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&dq=%22I+once+had+a+close+rapport+with+a%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjuu6fqtLLZAhUrAsAKHdVjDhkQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20once%20had%20a%20close%20rapport%20with%20a%22&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=j0n2DAAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&dq=%22...
• znt 9y ago
  This was around 7 years ago or so. Found about Google App Engine on Hacker News. Ended up learning Python & Django so I could deploy apps on App Engine. A couple years later, ended up doing (rather high profile) a couple of projects for Google itself. Have been putting bread on the table as a Python dev since then. Hacker News literally shaped my career, in a very very good way.
• sebringj 9y ago
  I cannot find a better source for bleeding edge/trends/tips in programming related and tech and just generally interesting articles. There just isn't any other place that's better. This is the last stop when you find it as far as I know. So it has given me a better sense of the world state of affairs as it relates to me, every day and then I make decisions accordingly.
• youdontknowtho 9y ago
  The sinking feeling that everything is not going to be OK.
• krrishd 9y ago
  I joined in high school, and several things came out of it: - I commented with feedback on a random product posted here several years ago, and got an internship from them out of it - I met a few other high schoolers with similar interests, and was added to a group called 'HS Hackers' that spawned the subsequent 'Hackathon Hackers' group, from which I was referred to some defining internships, met a co-founder, and met some of the more valuable people I know
• focuser 9y ago
  A habit of checking HN every 20 minutes. :)
• mlvljr 9y ago
  A hell ban!
• lisp_me_away 9y ago
  censorship
• TheTruestKyle 9y ago
  Nothing. You all are cunts who pretend that you are helping society when in reality you cunts are just circle jerking your ego and pretending to make the world a better place. I hope the majority of you get raped and have and struggle to sleep at night for the rest of your lives
• TheTruestKyle 9y ago
  Because most of you people are fascist cunts who pretend to care
• terribleplace 9y ago
  This community is full of circle jerking cunts that only help their privileged brothers. Fuck all of you. I honestly hope the majority of you people get fucking raped hard
• terribleplace 9y ago
  Sounds like you are a cunt. Hope you get raped with your privilege you fucking cunt. I hope all of tech gets fucked over because of your pompous cuntery
• terribleplace 9y ago
  Respectful and diverse huh? These privileged cunts are diverse huh? Man I really hope you get raped hard and stay awake at night thinking about the pain that your rape caused
• terribleplace 9y ago
  This community is full of privileged cunts who pretend to make the world a better place all while circle jerking each other
• terribleplace 9y ago
  The good comments are all downvoted and flagged because you and your privileged pussy friends here
• rapedangnow 9y ago
  Dang, I hope you get raped and no one is there to help you in life.
• rapedangnow 9y ago
  Fuck off your privileged cunt. I hope you get raped bitch
• cosinetau 9y ago
  New questions to answer, daily. Technically, a job, too.
• zengid 9y ago
  This is going to get buried, but HN has given me a place where I feel at home. It's community has just the right mixture of pragmatic empiricists, tasteful dreamers, and unabashed nerds. Thanks y'all!
• b3b0p 9y ago
  I would not have gone, been invited, or had the opportunity to attend Startup School 2010. I would have not met Alexis, Chris from Reddit [0], briefly meet Paul Graham [1], nor met Dr. Chrono (YC W11) founding team (Hi Katelyn, Michael, and Daniel!). Not to mention the quality of posts and resources I have learned about from reading comments. My reading list will last me until retirement. [0] http://chriskaukis.github.io/Alexis_Ohanian_and_Christopher_Slow_of_reddit.jpg http://chriskaukis.github.io/Alexis_Ohanian_and_Christopher_... [1] http://chriskaukis.github.io/Paul_Graham.jpg http://chriskaukis.github.io/Paul_Graham.jpg
• drawkbox 9y ago
  Everyday insights and knowledge from like minds, keeping up to date with new tech/languages/standards. I was also heavy in Python in 2006 and there was lots of Python focused content. Proggit, reddit/r/programming was also big at the time and had a similar feel. Back in 2007 it made me go get my masters in software engineering because the level of intellect seems more focused here, didn't need it but wanted some challenges. I also finally jumped to game development which was my goal to take on more challenges. Ultimately HN is a time sink that pays off as a motivator. It is closer to the old proggit than the rest of the web. I also love Paul Graham's essays.
• beeskneecaps 9y ago
  News addiction. But also an insane awareness of the latest tech that I’ve leveraged at startups for the past decade.
• swombat 9y ago
  Saved a life. About 5 years ago a friend was kidnapped by Indian police on behalf of their parents who were trying to gain custody of them, in India, on a Friday evening. By the time they landed in Delhi on Saturday, HN had helped me and another prominent user here find a lawyer to take the case. When the case was heard first thing Monday morning the lawyer demolished it and this friend regained their freedom (and has had it since). Whilst I cannot be sure what would have happened if the case had gone the other way, I think it could easily have ended in this friend's suicide. HN has helped me in countless other ways but this one trumps them all I think. You don't get much more tangible than actively saving someone from abuse and possible death.
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    Sounds familiar. Thank you Daniel, for all you've done. In case anybody is wondering about what this refers to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4739649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4739649
• yowlingcat 9y ago
  Lots of pros and cons, but those mostly reflect on myself. Coming out of college in '11, I had spent the past few years of my degree on HN constantly, very eager to work for a startup. Ended up working for a couple ones which went belly up pretty quickly, and quickly learned some life skills flavored cynicism. Tried my hand at cofounding a startup, got screwed over by my cofounder right as we were about to close our $1M seed, went into a spiral of depression. Realized that I was not the first or last person this happened to, and found the strength to ask for help, lawyer up, find a new job, etc. At that point, I was still only a year and a half out of college. After that point, I began to work at funded, solvent mid sized firms for the past few years with increasingly higher amounts of salary and responsibility. It's now more than a couple years later, and although I've still got complaints with my current job situation, I've built up the skills to find a new job that will make me happier, the perspective to appreciate the journey I've been on in my past few, and savings to buffet some changes. At some point, I'm sure I'm going to try and take a side project full-time, but in the meantime, I'm pretty content making my career changes at my own pace, with my own agency, and with gradual results I'm happy with. HN has provided a great forum to allow me to break through the reality distortion fields so common on the job (especially at startups) and make sane, levelheaded decisions. Lots of folks here have made the journey from student to engineer to founder, and I hope to one day join them! I'm beyond excited for when the right time comes for me to begin the next phase of my journey bootstrapping a lifestyle venture. It's one of the main things that keeps me going during shitty days at work, honestly.
• sp527 9y ago
  Spending time on HN has allowed me to keep in touch with the pulse of the tech industry and the cutting edge in software. Honestly, many individual sessions of delving into HN end up feeling like a waste of time. However, there are enough indications of triggered thoughts derived from HN posts/comments in my day-to-day to suggest that it's quite valuable in the aggregate, over a sufficiently lengthy period of observation. It's also quite useful at times to comment on posts (particularly technical ones). I find that helps me refine my own thoughts and become a more discerning developer and industry strategist through feedback.
• b3lvedere 9y ago
  I gradually found out that a lot of tech news starts right here at HN. Great responses as well. Very professional and very mature. This may sound strange, but sometimes i feel like an stupid idiot around here and i kinda like that, because i'm learning great new things. Sometimes i also act like an idiot, but i hope i can apologise for that. :)
• wheresvic1 9y ago
  Unfortunately, I only found out about HN a couple of years back in 2016. I had been looking for such a community for an incredibly long time and somehow I used to always wonder how some of my colleagues knew what was the latest in the tech scene. Anyways, when I first joined, I fell into a bit of a depression due to the impostor syndrome :(. Fortunately for me, I had quite a few other changes happening in my personal life so I was able to snap out of it and focus on using the platform to learn and grow rather than be intimidated. I had also recently started blogging in 2015 and I remember submitting one of my articles (it was about using gmail with mutt) to HN. It hit front page for over 100 points) and it was one of the most thrilling moments of my career! I went on to get a few more submissions on to the front page and HN also gave my the confidence to launch my side project which also hit the front page: https://ewolo.fitness https://ewolo.fitness A big thank you to everyone on here :)
• kbd 9y ago
  Found my current job through HN's "Who is Hiring" threads.
  • hobolord 9y ago
    yeah I found my job through the "Who wants to be hired" thread
• ficklepickle 9y ago
  HN kinda saved my life. I have lurked since about 2015. In that time, I have learned so much, which has been a big confidence booster. I never felt like I belonged anywhere before I found HN. I don't post much, but I love reading all the different opinions in the comments. I don't know anywhere else where there is (largely) civilized debate about such a wide range of fascinating topics.
• mar77i 9y ago
  Surprisingly little comic relief. It's almost sad.
• jhuckestein 9y ago
  I have been reading HN regularly for 10 years. It has taught me everything I needed to know to get started. I applied to YC 4 times, got rejected 3 times, crashed one startup and ultimately found my current cofounder through the YC community. HN is not perfect, but I am incredibly grateful for everything it has given me. Like so many here, I couldn’t have done it without Hacker News :) To this day, the advice I give anyone who wants to get into technology or starting a company is to read everything on HN for 3 months and to look up all the things you don’t understand.
• pascalxus 9y ago
  I think it's awesome that hacker news doesn't ban people just for sharing their works. It's one of the few places where you can share a link for a solution that's relevant to the conversation/article at hand.
• crystalPalace 9y ago
  HN has taught me what great comments and writing look like, introduced me to cool and obscure tech, and shown me that everyone experiences imposter syndrome. I'm especially grateful for getting a push out of my comfort zone when I was job searching. I got an offer to do contract development work from a post on HN which lead to starting a business and being a full-time, remote developer. I've gotten several clients and job offers from blog posts that have received attention on here and people have always been helpful and respectful in the comments section especially in comparison to other sites.
• gigatexal 9y ago
  HN is really a novel place because amatuer developers like me can interact with founders, 10x devs, and everyone in between without fear of mockery for the most part. The feedback is very often constructive. For the internet in 2018 that's a feat unto itself.
• 0x11 9y ago
  I've spent the past hour reading through just some of the unbelievable stories in this thread, the whole time thinking, or maybe hoping, that someday this community would somehow benefit me in such a meaningful way as well. It just finally struck me, however, that one of the most significant changes in my recent life and one that has made me feel the most fulfilled can be traced back to reading a post on HN. In 2016 I read an something on here about a new conpletely free software university in San Francisco called 42. A few months later I was in SF learning/teaching myself to code in C alongside some of the most brilliant people I've ever met. If you'd have asked two weeks ago, HN, I'd have told you I was developing a mobile app in React Native for a quirky company in Prague. If you ask today, I'm unemployed and working on a website to showcase my skills. Either way, I'm miles from where I started and never would have been here had it not been for that post. Thank you HackerNews.
• wglb 9y ago
  Got my first security gig by reaching out to someone here on HN. Lots of high quality discussions here, with quite a range of experts. Where else can you find more than one lawyer who is also a compiler developer? World-class experts in small business, cryptography, breaking cryptography, old war stories, and lively discussion on many topics.
• mx1093472 9y ago
  I haven't done anything amazing like a lot of these people, but I sure enjoy reading about them.
• feralmoan 9y ago
  Aqueducts.
• danso 9y ago
  I’ve bought a lot of books and tech based on recommendations made here.
• sidcool 9y ago
  The good things include inspiration, ambition, talking to like minded people, discovering great tech content etc. The bad things include FOMO, addiction to HN, anxiety, low self-confidence. The key is balance.
• jes5199 9y ago
  internet addiction
• luckystrike 9y ago
  I started reading HN when it was called Startup News, and it has changed my life. I now live in a small village near the Himalayas, and run my startup called Resumonk (along with my Co-Founder). We both work remotely, pay ourselves well and have the freedom to live life completely on our terms. I'm now living my dream and HN played a huge role in it. Apart from the learning related to startups/tech, reading the views of all the smart people here on a variety of other topics has made me a better person. It has also given me insights on different cultures & people from different backgrounds. A big thanks to everyone who contributes here. Your words/submissions silently might be having a great positive impact in some corner of the world. Please keep sharing your knowledge & experience. p.s. Also met my Co-Founder through HN when he did a 'Show HN' for Resumonk!
• obbobo 9y ago
  I created an account just to write a comment here. I've been a spectator for years - I read comments on this site at least once a day. So many great insights from smart people. I'm a big fan!
• ramon 9y ago
  Hey guys, thank you all for sharing great stories but I stopped when someone said it made me start dancing ;).
• vladmk 9y ago
  It introduced me to a friend who was a friend of a friend that I didn't even know who lived locally. As a result of that relationship this person met with me and introduced me to his partner, his partner happened to refer a 50k business deal. The butterfly effect ;) We didn't close the deal, but without HN I'd never even be able to swing. This friend I made through hacker news would also later speak at my meetup.
• FrederikET 9y ago
  Despite being a new user have I used a bit of time in here. HN has given me another perspective. It has given me a perspective beyond the large companies like Google and Facebook. I'm blessed by all the small upcoming companies we see in here!
• mathgladiator 9y ago
  a place to catch up on technologies, and to get a sense of where thinking in various industries are headed.
• BobCat 9y ago
  I think I'm shadowbanned here, so I don't really have much to say.
  • smoyer 9y ago
    I don't think you're shadowbanned here.
    • dang 9y ago
      They were, but I unbanned them after seeing the comment and looking at the recent history. We garbage collect unnecessary bans that way, although it's sporadic and ad hoc.
• KozmoNau7 9y ago
  It's nothing majorly life-changing, like some of the other people in these comments (and I'm a bit late to the party). But HN has given me a mostly nerd/geek/hacker/science/generally curious person focused news site that is simple and straightforward and doesn't try to track me or otherwise infringe on my privacy. It has also given me comment sections that are generally full of thoughtful and intelligent comments, some of which I vehemently disagree with, but they are intelligent nonetheless. This is a marked contrast to the comments on Slashdot, where political rants and virulent racism/sexism/general assholishness seems to be the norm now. So thanks everyone, for being civil and respectful.
• werber 9y ago
  An online community where I almost always feel like the dumbest person in the thread, priceless
• cpfohl 9y ago
  Found my job through who's hitting
  • jxub 9y ago
    *hiring? ;)
    • cpfohl 9y ago
      Lol, yup
• punchclockhero 9y ago
  skytorrents.in. Arguably life changing.
  • CosmicShadow 9y ago
    YES! I almost forgot about that, super valuable!
• stefantalpalaru 9y ago
  A hellban.
• rblion 9y ago
  A sense of belonging with a group of people who are passionate about technology, science, design, entrepreneurship. I don't get that from reddit or people I know in real life. I'm going to apply to YC S18. I didn't get in last year but I'm only 28 and I have worked on every area of my life over the last year and feel ready to try again.
• vfulco 9y ago
  Besides daily inspiration, I am constantly challenged and exposed to new tools I can bring into my professional services business. Some outstanding clients have found me in an indirect way after I offered a couple of unemployed readers a free resume review (one of our business lines). I was able to help others while growing my business even though pure marketing is verboten. It's an invaluable community of generally upbeat do-ers and visionaries.
• core_dmped 9y ago
  Congratulations!