The thing to realize about HN, social media more broadly, and life in general, is that there is always much more noise than signal, but there are also always nu

The thing to realize about HN, social media more broadly, and life in general, is that there is always much more noise than signal, but there are also always nuggets of extremely valuable signal mixed in at random with the noise. If you want to discover the signal, you can't hate the noise. Understand that noise may even be a generator of signal. Embrace it, explore it, and harvest the signal from it. As such, a few things I've learned on HN have positively impacted my career in a major way and sent me down a career path I may not have discovered otherwise. Namely functional programming, formal methods, and PLT (to which I wasn't exposed in school). I've also met people here I've later collaborated with IRL. The name of the game is figuring out which noise is more likely to generate the most valuable signal for you. For example, if you're a programmer, then the noise of celebrity Twitter is going to generate much less signal for you than HN, programming Reddits, or similar. Be strategic about where you spend your time, but also be forgiving of the noise. It's part of the process.