I've always thought HN was more like the spiritual successor to Slashdot then (most of) Reddit. On /. it was COMMON to be participating in a discussion about (

I've always thought HN was more like the spiritual successor to Slashdot then (most of) Reddit. On /. it was COMMON to be participating in a discussion about (for example) a camera problem on one of NASAs' probes, and very soon you would discover that the actual people from NASA that were working on it were in the forum talking about what they were actually doing and getting to the core issues rather then the press-release fluff. If there was a science/tech story you could almost guarantee that the authors of the paper themselves would show up, and all of a sudden you would get 10PHD's from different fields all "working together". There was another thread that I remember a bit better because I was involved in it. Somebody had an old/obscure bit of computer hardware that was last used in a 386. (A tape-drive backup that used the floppy-controller to read/write data to the drive.) The person was desperate to get a copy of his thesis off of the drive, but there was a hardware failure on both the drive and the old PC. Well in the thread one of the old engineers that had designed the drive at his old company chimed and said he had the part that was broken and would ship it out to him. Then another person offered to send a USB to Floppy controller so that his "new PC" (sans floppy interface) would be able to work. THEN the tech director of a major backup company (software) offered his labs to have the the whole PC & tape drive shipped to their headquarters where the lab would get the files off the drive for free because "I want my team to have the chance to train on this, and learn how to restore it all." In the end it was a happy story for the end-user. But I see a similar gathering of the minds on HN as I once did on Slashdot. My /. ID was 5 digits.... The internet was different back then, but it's nice to see that people can still be the same.