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Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

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261–270 of 283 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#261

I've been a hobbyist programmer since I was about 6 years old. I had done just about every other job in IT besides sling code. Reading HN and conversing with a friend of mine in a CS program at Uni are what motivated me to turn my hobby into a new career, at 31 years old. It was through HN that I realized that I knew a heck of a lot more relevant job skills than I thought I did. Threads on HN also connected the dots…

Did you become a software engineer?

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#262
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're most welcome -- glad I had the link. > Very hard to find such data. That is the understatement of the decade.

Huh interesting the site is offering the free data as a byproduct to sell affordably priced subscriptions. They could probably improve their SEO, unless they are new within the past nine months or so. When I searched historical options prices extensively nothing came up. Do you have any affiliation with them? If not I can reach out directly. There are some pretty obvious strategies that would make them much more prom…

Nope, no relationship, and I don't even remember how I found them :-). I added that link to pinboard in November, 2019, so they've been around at least that long.

But by all means reach out to me if you've got a winning options strategy :-) or want freelance data-mangling or web stuff done (I'm retired, I'm a pretty good programmer) to get there.

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#264

I learned how to negotiate when someone linked to the famous kalzumeus software article on the subject. I've probably made tens of thousands of extra dollars in my life from it.

Also I got a job that I found on a who's hiring thread.

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#265
post #114
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments on. Can you expand on your methods here? I still get value from HN but want to dial things back a bit.

The average comment quality nosedives when the subject has in any way been politicized. I don’t always follow it, but as a rule for any post about climate, immigration, diversity, and so on reading the comments is at best a waste of time even when the submission is high quality. Comment quality is generally high on computing related technical subjects—unsurprisingly for a community composed of subject matter experts.…

People needed most in political debates have removed themselves from it.

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#266

The thing to realize about HN, social media more broadly, and life in general, is that there is always much more noise than signal, but there are also always nuggets of extremely valuable signal mixed in at random with the noise. If you want to discover the signal, you can't hate the noise. Understand that noise may even be a generator of signal. Embrace it, explore it, and harvest the signal from it. As such, a few…

PLT = Programming Language Theory [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#267
Hackers news when at work is my goto for almost every moment I need a distraction from the current focus point to reset the mind that may have become bogged down. It lacks flashy content that is designed to suck you in, and if you do get stuck, it almost always a valuable gem of knowledge that you gain. When not working, it’s just a familiar and eclectic mix of news and stories that are presented in a realistic manner, and I love to scan the responses for alternatives of all kinds. I’ve almost given up on Reddit, it used to be my goto long agai, and Facebook is just a pain (with its see once and never see again system). Btw, I’m not even a computer scientist, I’m a geologist, but we do use a lot of tech surprisingly!

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#268
post #261

I've been a hobbyist programmer since I was about 6 years old. I had done just about every other job in IT besides sling code. Reading HN and conversing with a friend of mine in a CS program at Uni are what motivated me to turn my hobby into a new career, at 31 years old. It was through HN that I realized that I knew a heck of a lot more relevant job skills than I thought I did. Threads on HN also connected the dots…

Did you become a software engineer?

For a while. Currently a devops lead.

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#269
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I ran the numbers (which was a couple years ago) the HN community was at least 50% outside the US.

But the assumption is that the US userbase is concentrated in the bay area. So its mostly people in or near SF and the like.

You're right that it's a common assumption! But that same analysis showed that only about 10% of HN users are physically near the Bay Area.

Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

#270
I got my first few customers from Hacker News for my app.

It's nothing and not a huge amount of money but it's my SaaS after 10 years trying to make and build a profitable SaaS app that people are willing to use and pay for.

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the app is an email forwarding service https://hanami.run

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