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Ask HN: Who/what introduced you to Hacker News? How long have you been here?

1 points by penaazv 3y ago

I'm a pretty recent (active) user here. It's been less than a week. I was introduced to it quite a while ago due to YC, and us applying as a tech startup. Also came across stories of viral or pretty successful HN launch posts by fellow startups. And ofc, heard some pretty great things about the candidness of the community. How about you?

eimrine 3y ago
All programming forums I was previously active on, just effectively stopped their existance. Some of them literally, some of them made moderation too severe to be useful, some of them got flooded with semi-advare. Medium stopped being interesting. IRQ stopped being a place with any users online. HN is the last island of freedom.
- penaazv 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing! What's IRQ? "HN is the last island of freedom" - love this line.
  - bguebert 3y ago
    I'm guessing a little, but they probably meant IRC or, less likely, ICQ
    - eimrine 3y ago
      Exactly! Two abbreviations glued into one in my head, but I do not miss that much about latter as about former.
sdfzguf 3y ago
2019 and I don't remember how. I don't even do anything computer related, but I'm interested in it. I remember seeing the design of the forum and imidiatly fell in love with it.
- penaazv 3y ago
  That's pretty cool. The general curiosity is mutual. I see you had to create a new account though... If it's okay to ask, what happened to the last one?
  - sdfzguf 3y ago
    Every few month I make a new one. That's because I like to share personal information when I discuss certain topics. I don't have secrets to hide, but I just don't feel comfortable having it all in one place. I want to stay as anonymous as I can. I try to avoid an account that paints a comprehensive picture of my thoughts, interests, job situations, hopes, whatever, you name it There is a bullet point in the guidelines about exactly that. It's not desired behaivor. But I don't feel bad about it, because I don't intend to misuse it. Kind of related: I'm worried about the new language recognition tools of today and tomorrow. Last time I've seen a post about HN users, they needed 10k (?) words from an account to make a connection between accounts. Edit: This is the mentioned post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
    - penaazv 3y ago
      Wow. I did not see this coming. And highly appreciate you sharing this. I never really thought it through with this perspective. And yes, it's kinda concerning.
      - sdfzguf 3y ago
        It is, isn't it? I'm waiting for an AI tool that translates the text that I enter into the text field into a de-personalized text with the same context. It has to be possible to identify indentifiers and change the text while maintaining the coherent argument/ thought of the text. Would have to be computated locally, before interacting with anything online. But I'm not aware such a tool exists as of now. Needless to say, this takes something away from the communication. A sacrifice I might be willing to make. Idk yet