Good advice.
Ask HN: What has HN given you?
261–270 of 602 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#262In 2011-2013, HN gave me the necessary understanding of business, enough that I confidently quit my employer and created my own online app. I call HN my « rogue MBA »:
- Major: Patrick McKenzie
- Minors: Non-factual knowledge, just a deep understanding of what is to be expected when managing a business, good and bad patterns, dozens of failure reports from other startups, why seed money isn’t necessarily a good thing and the mere existence of bootstrapping, HN gave me an intuition that is hard to describe but lead me to success.
- And with HN I have a better source of news than IT journalism, which is often 1 step behind, has their own interpretation and doesn’t have multiple points of view like the comment section on HN.
I spent 2 years reading before my first comment, because I didn’t feel legitimate commenting before creating my own startup. Now I’m a CEO ;) Thank you HN.
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#263HN told me that the world is larger than I thought and that I don't know that much about it.
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#264For me the coolest thing about HN is the breadth of experts here for any (even niche) tech field. This allows for in depth understanding of new products (when someone who actually worked on the team making it is here) or calling out conspiracy theories about why some company shut down some product (because they have inside knowledge and can actually explain the reasoning). I can't count how many times I've read 'I wo…
A few of my favourites: Low level optimization - nkurz BeeOnRope dragontamer Programming Languages - pcwalton jordwalke chrisseaton Other people who work on well-known things that comment frequently: jblow (The Witness, Braid) phire (The Dolphin Emulator) pizlonator (Webkit/JSC) I made a web app just so I could subscribe and read all their comments via RSS: http://hnblogs.thume.ca/
Interesting you have jblow on there, as I just was watching his programming stream on twitch yesterday and he said he doesn't really come to HN much anymore. His reasoning was basically that he wanted a place where programmers were working on harder things (basically CRUD web devs).
I think he is missing a lot of content on here if that's his true opinion. I think you can find all sorts of varying levels of depths on a vast amount of technical issues.
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#265Nearly 5 years ago, a few months after being rejected from YC and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499 ). It was our last-ditch attempt to show a proof-of-concept to the world before going back to our old bosses to ask for our jo…
Nice man congrats! You're livin' the dream :)
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#2662 jobs
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#267A bad habit.
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#268Next to nothing. I scan for links and sometimes find one or two to my interest. I might scan the comments to see if the link is being revered or dissed before I visit. If I'm bored, I've made a few comments. Otherwise HN is nothing more than a link list to me.
What’s your version of what HN is to other people? In the way that people learn about new things, connect with others in various niches, etc—where do you go for that?
I don't have such a thing. Eventually they all turn into reddit, populated by kids and amateurs and unemployed wannabe programmers. So they are all for skimming only.
The last great place to go was Stack Overflow but it, too, is now overrun by redditors and other amateurs and I no longer help out there even though I'm in the upper three percent. There is one forum I still go to but the past year has shown an erosion there as it has become popular among the non-elite tech group.
There are some mailing lists which are exclusive but sparsely visited unfortunately. Same with IRC. So its better to be good at Googling and gleaning fact over fiction, not finding a good forum.
The same is true of "news". There is no good source for news anymore and you have to do your own vetting, something news editors used to do but no more.
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an awesome story. Congrats! Quick question: My understanding may need to be updated, but doesn't YC give you Ramen-survival cash? How did you deal with the financial challenges with so little and a family, etc.?
Yeah, the first year even after YC funding was very tough. Long story short: sold a car, borrowed a ton on those credit card write-yourself-a-check 2% balance transfer deals (thankfully had good credit to be able to do that), and withdrew early from an IRA (those penalties hurt!) - wouldn’t recommend :)
I'm delighted to hear that after taking on all that risk and "doubling down" by believing in yourself(ves), that you're doing great now. Totally inspirational success story!
Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?
#270We shared news about our open protocol for resumable file uploads tus.io and on a few occasions this hit the front page. We haven’t done anything else to “market” it and so I’d say this was the single thing that gave it traction and turned it into a success. Vimeo rolled out support for it in production last week and we couldn’t be happier and more thankful towards HN as a platform to discuss our inventions