I followed the link here from Paul Graham's personal website, where he keeps his collection of essays.[1] A local friend recommended that I read his essay "Why

I followed the link here from Paul Graham's personal website, where he keeps his collection of essays.[1] A local friend recommended that I read his essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"[2] back before Hacker News existed, and later an online friend recommended that I read "What You'll Wish You'd Known."[3] Then I started keeping an eye out for new essays by Paul Graham, and eventually while reading one of them I followed the link to what was then known as Startup News. I was in lurk mode for a while, not having anything to say about most of the core topics here, until one day a discussion of linguistics or something else I actually know about drew me into commenting. An odd coincidence is that patio11, one of the community's favorite commenters and one of mine, and I have the same join date. Of course patio11 deservedly has far more karma for both submissions and comments than I have. I'm very grateful for his efforts and the efforts of many other participants to keep this a community friendly to thoughtful, informed, international discussion. P.S. I found this thread by looking for active threads. I do that sometimes here on HN to find interesting threads I missed while they were most visible on the HN front page or new page. [1] http://paulgraham.com/articles.html http://paulgraham.com/articles.html [2] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html [3] http://paulgraham.com/hs.html http://paulgraham.com/hs.html