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Hacker News is like a slot machine with positive expected value. Most days are interesting or sometimes a waste of time. Occasionally you see something like alt

by graeme 6y ago

Hacker News is like a slot machine with positive expected value. Most days are interesting or sometimes a waste of time. Occasionally you see something like altering. I’ve gotten one big business idea that changed how I ran things and made me a lot of money. Like I mean permanently life altering my business worked instead of didn’t amount of money. But most days are not like that. You also get some information early. For example, if you paid attention you could have bought calls on Gamestop when they were cheap or puts on the S and P when they were cheap back in early 2020. It’s a filter: WSB talks about a ton of stocks, but when a news story hits HN that says “WSB is talking about Gamestop”? That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information. Hacker News can be dumb in some ways of course but it is the highest signal place I know on the internet and genuinely early on a lot of things. However, to get any benefit out of it you have to enjoy it, and it doesn’t sound like you do, so you probably wouldn’t benefit as things are. I think the motto about it being a place to gratify intellectual curious really sums it up. This is a forum for people who are curious, and you come every day looking for interesting stuff. Slanted to programming, tech and business building, but with a mix of everything. And if you think about what you are working on as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mettamage 6y ago
I'm happy OP asked the question, because this wasn't/wouldn't be in my answer. But now that I've read yours, I couldn't agree more.
throw14082020 6y ago
It would be nice to know more about what you got out of HN (permanently life improving, I'd like some of that please?). To me, HN is an interesting distraction from deep work. Perhaps you have a better strategy of extracting value from HN, maybe you can share that. I can't disprove "That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.", but buying GME based on posts on HN to me (or selling), is absurd and is extremely far from "inside information". As someone who noticed the GME pump 1 week before its peak and spends time on HN, there was no way I was going to put money in GME or "ride it to the moon".
- graeme 6y ago
  Basically I was running a business, and found someone on HN whose site exposed me to a substantially better model for the same asset I had. Revenues eventually 10x. It’s not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific model wouldn’t help you here, but basically if you have a business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly: 1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset 2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better 3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing deep work (I fall prey to this at times) You’ll see some stories in this thread of people who were not programmers on HN and who received the message “hey you can be a programmer”. If you have this knowledge it is trivial, if you don’t it is life transforming. So whether HN has any life transforming potential for you depends on whether you have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path which is substantially better than the old path. ————— For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic knowledge of call options. 1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big signal is showing “hey wsb seems to be on to something, it made it through the hn bubble”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 2. My reaction was “oh interesting” (—> note to self “stop and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early pandemic stories too) 3. But what you could have done was checked the price of short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose 10x so I’d be surprised if call options returned less than that. (If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know_ Don’t put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time your ROI would be very positive. The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and adjacent tech sources I’d say I knew pretty much what was going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north America. I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve. Disclaimer, to all reading: please don’t start gambling on HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to other sources and has high signal.
xtiansimon 6y ago
> “And if you think about what you are working on as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.” This for me. I’m greatly satisfied when a problem I’m working is also a topic oh HN—even obliquely. Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.
- graeme 6y ago
  > Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle. Precisely. Well put. There’s no way HN works as a quick fix or as a direct source of gains.
- planet-and-halo 6y ago
  I think you hit the crux of the issue. On the one hand, life does not work the way OP assumes. It's not linear, we don't "read HN –> profit." On the other hand, news in general can become a meaningless and value-less distraction. So I think they key is what you said: intellectual curiosity and exposure to high-signal information, without a highly specific goal in mind. You get the value of serendipity and filling in some unknown unknowns while avoiding senseless and endless clicking. HN fills that niche about as well as anything, though it certainly can become a distraction if you let it.
- geswit2x 6y ago
  > “ Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.” I read HN for sentences like this.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
The biggest life-altering idea that was personally investable to cross hacker news is most certainly Bitcoin. That’s something we all knew intimately about before the general public. I wonder how many HN people became buy-and-hold millionaires.
- graeme 6y ago
  Heh, I think about that a lot. But no way I would have held until now, personally. However, for anyone psychologically inclined to like the idea of BTC and hold they could have found out about it early and got them for pennies or even mined.
matwood 6y ago
> That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information. As a person who gets paid convert knowledge into product, HN is an easy place to check a once or twice/day to keep up to date on decently filtered knowledge/information. I have other sources I follow, but as you said, if it hits HN it's probably important enough that I should know it exist. And yes, this is a vague answer because that base level knowledge can manifest itself in many ways when solving a problem. In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments on.
- danieka 6y ago
  That sounds like a very interesting job. Without giving away too much, what other sources do you use?
  - 177tcca 6y ago
    Probably reddit, lobsters, newsgroups, mailing lists, Matrix, IRC, etc. Like any good CTO type.
    - ignoramous 6y ago
      CTO roles are not as rigid or well-defined as one would assume: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c...
  - matwood 6y ago
    What I've found generally, is it's all about curation. You have to be ruthless about curating at all times. If some source that used to have a great S/N ratio, suddenly doesn't, then drop it.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      Very much agreed. Nostalgia seldom pays off.
- 6y ago

by graeme 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mettamage 6y ago

I'm happy OP asked the question, because this wasn't/wouldn't be in my answer. But now that I've read yours, I couldn't agree more.

throw14082020 6y ago

It would be nice to know more about what you got out of HN (permanently life improving, I'd like some of that please?). To me, HN is an interesting distraction from deep work. Perhaps you have a better strategy of extracting value from HN, maybe you can share that. I can't disprove "That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.", but buying GME based on posts on HN to me (or selling), is absurd and is extremely far from "inside information". As someone who noticed the GME pump 1 week before its peak and spends time on HN, there was no way I was going to put money in GME or "ride it to the moon".

graeme 6y ago
Basically I was running a business, and found someone on HN whose site exposed me to a substantially better model for the same asset I had. Revenues eventually 10x. It’s not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific model wouldn’t help you here, but basically if you have a business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly: 1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset 2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better 3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing deep work (I fall prey to this at times) You’ll see some stories in this thread of people who were not programmers on HN and who received the message “hey you can be a programmer”. If you have this knowledge it is trivial, if you don’t it is life transforming. So whether HN has any life transforming potential for you depends on whether you have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path which is substantially better than the old path. ————— For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic knowledge of call options. 1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big signal is showing “hey wsb seems to be on to something, it made it through the hn bubble”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 2. My reaction was “oh interesting” (—> note to self “stop and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early pandemic stories too) 3. But what you could have done was checked the price of short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose 10x so I’d be surprised if call options returned less than that. (If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know_ Don’t put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time your ROI would be very positive. The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and adjacent tech sources I’d say I knew pretty much what was going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north America. I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve. Disclaimer, to all reading: please don’t start gambling on HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to other sources and has high signal.

xtiansimon 6y ago

> “And if you think about what you are working on as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.” This for me. I’m greatly satisfied when a problem I’m working is also a topic oh HN—even obliquely. Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.

graeme 6y ago
> Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle. Precisely. Well put. There’s no way HN works as a quick fix or as a direct source of gains.
planet-and-halo 6y ago
I think you hit the crux of the issue. On the one hand, life does not work the way OP assumes. It's not linear, we don't "read HN –> profit." On the other hand, news in general can become a meaningless and value-less distraction. So I think they key is what you said: intellectual curiosity and exposure to high-signal information, without a highly specific goal in mind. You get the value of serendipity and filling in some unknown unknowns while avoiding senseless and endless clicking. HN fills that niche about as well as anything, though it certainly can become a distraction if you let it.
geswit2x 6y ago
> “ Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.” I read HN for sentences like this.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

The biggest life-altering idea that was personally investable to cross hacker news is most certainly Bitcoin. That’s something we all knew intimately about before the general public. I wonder how many HN people became buy-and-hold millionaires.

graeme 6y ago
Heh, I think about that a lot. But no way I would have held until now, personally. However, for anyone psychologically inclined to like the idea of BTC and hold they could have found out about it early and got them for pennies or even mined.

matwood 6y ago

> That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information. As a person who gets paid convert knowledge into product, HN is an easy place to check a once or twice/day to keep up to date on decently filtered knowledge/information. I have other sources I follow, but as you said, if it hits HN it's probably important enough that I should know it exist. And yes, this is a vague answer because that base level knowledge can manifest itself in many ways when solving a problem. In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments on.

danieka 6y ago
That sounds like a very interesting job. Without giving away too much, what other sources do you use?
- 177tcca 6y ago
  Probably reddit, lobsters, newsgroups, mailing lists, Matrix, IRC, etc. Like any good CTO type.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    CTO roles are not as rigid or well-defined as one would assume: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c...
- matwood 6y ago
  What I've found generally, is it's all about curation. You have to be ruthless about curating at all times. If some source that used to have a great S/N ratio, suddenly doesn't, then drop it.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    Very much agreed. Nostalgia seldom pays off.
6y ago