6 ms·
Ask HN: How did you discover Hacker News?
- shanewei 5mo agoRecommended by Codex
- ColinWright 5mo agoI drew a graph of connections between Paul Graham essays, and coloured them via a PageRank-style weighting algorithm. I emailed it to PG, and he suggested I post it here.
- verdverm 5mo agoCollege roommate 17 years ago while doing NSF summer research, I am eternally grateful Eric!
- rationalist 5mo agoIt was so long ago (with a different account), that I don't remember.
- m-hodges 5mo agoSaw I post on /r/programming in 2011.
- CobaltFire 5mo agoCoworker about 10 years ago. Took me a few years to register an account.
- dang 5mo agoThrough pg's essays, which I discovered via a Joel Spolsky blog post. Perhaps this one: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- chistev 5mo agoMan, you've been here since the beginning!
- kirubakaran 5mo agoLooks like I created my account a week before dang! I was lurking for a few months before I actually created the account.
- andrewmcwatters 5mo ago[dead]
- kirubakaran 5mo agoI started reading Paul Graham's essays after listening to his talk: https://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail188.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.con...
- cantalopes 5mo agoI think i got linked here from a slashdot article. That one is flooded with russian trolls nowadays so i mostly visit hacker news, and people are nicer here too
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoCant remember. Probably searching for an answer to some coding problem.
- brudgers 5mo agoLinks to HN on Techmeme, and I was on Techmeme because I was interested in memes. I was interested in memes because I had read Daniel Dennitt's Consciousness Explained back in the mid 1990's and was on the internet looking at them because the meme meme had become more mainstream. Or to put it another way, I found HN through intellectual curiosity as a distraction from my practice collapsing in the sub-prime meltdown...it was long ago in a galaxy far far away.
- larrykubin 5mo agoI think I signed up one of the first days after it launched, it was called Startup News. Either from a pg essay or reddit, can't remember which.
- JessieJanie 5mo agoMy AI agent, Ziggy Stardust, told me about it.
- defrost 5mo agoGot a tip from a fellow admin on IRC (Freenode v1.0) and made an account (since lost) in 2007 - followed up in late 2008, been an on and off reader / commenter since then, more so lately given less hands on work IRL.
- jaredsohn 5mo agoStrangely I think it was TechCrunch. But I was reading pg's essays years earlier (maybe through Joel On Software) and already had known about yc. Think it was related to the initial request for startups post: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/y-combinator-starts-seeding-ideas-to-startups/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/y-combinator-starts-seedin...
- mna_ 5mo agoA chatter linked HN on #commonlisp on freenode back in 2011.
- fabianholzer 5mo agoI was researching frameworks for building progressive web apps and stumbled over "Hacker News as a PWA" (https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas).
- pvaldes 5mo agoHum... don't remember. The oldest HN post that I can positively remember right now is the Wash my Ferrari problem from 2012 so it should be via Debian forums
- geldedus 5mo agovia Paul Graham
- tsoukase 4mo agoI was hovering over PC forums since 2000 until in 2018 I stumbled upon here. My first thought: where the hell was this treasure hidden all this time? Second thought: are there such gems for other fields (my field-medicine, sports, travel etc)? I found none with so high quality, curration, expertise.
- runjake 4mo agoA pg essay almost two decades ago, when the site was still called Startup News.
- j4nek 4mo agosomeone on irc once posted a link to a hn discussion. :)
- gadders 4mo agoMichael Arrington told everyone about it on TechCrunch.
- mkbkn 4mo agoI don't remember but probably it was StumbleUpon. Around 2012.
- lordluca 4mo agoit was recommended by both codex and code
- varunKvK 4mo agoI used to search hacker news and used to get the YC website and accidently got into this.
- FergusArgyll 4mo agoCS50x at the end there was a short list of places to check out
- propellortail 4mo agoI can't remember. It's been at least 15 years? HN is still worth reading and the level of discourse is still quite high (though slightly worse than a decade ago). But it's refreshing to have a place where the comments are better than the prose of the linked articles in question.
- kypro 4mo agoI was obsessed with creating tech startups in my bedroom before I even knew what the term "startup" meant. I was showing a friend a hosting service I built and he told me to check out Hacker News. This must have been around 2009. Discovering HN quite literally changed my life in various ways. It's genuinely insane how much this site, and that conversation, has directly and indirectly been the source of various branches my life has taken. Things were so fun and dynamic back then. This was back when people would post weird weekend projects here and within a few months were millionaires. I'm sure it still happens, but much less frequently.
- BuiltByElly 4mo agoMy JavaScript tutor made mention of it in one of her videos. I checked it out and created an account only for me to abandon HN till I came back this year to create a new account and now I find HN interesting :)
- hett2576 4mo ago[dead]