I signed up for HN 14 years ago yesterday (whoa!). The biggest thing I've gotten out of it over the past 14 years is meeting a lot of interesting people workin

I signed up for HN 14 years ago yesterday (whoa!). The biggest thing I've gotten out of it over the past 14 years is meeting a lot of interesting people working on cool gear. People who I wouldn't have known about at all otherwise. The second biggest thing is exposure to all those cool projects. I love new programming languages and this has been the most reliable place to learn about them. Almost never from an announcement, but from the early users of those languages trying to convince everyone to join them. I don't spend nearly as much time as I used to here, but there was one other intangible benefit early on -- HN helped me be more precise in my written communications. Not really knowing anyone here but wanting to contribute forced me to think through the things that I was saying much more than hanging out on irc or Slashdot.