Yes, it's a waste of time, I would leave and not return. I haven't made any money or started any companies or met any wives on this site, it's a total joke.
I only browse sites with an average ROI of at least 1 wife per week.
Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
51–60 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#52HN had no business impact on me but it is the best information source i am aware of. I get to see bleeding edge technologies discussed first. The vast i will never use but i do get a broad view of technologies which are new, interesting to test or see them maturing.
But the best information is seeing articles about companies struggling with some new tech. Whether it‘s an database which has a lot of problems writing data safely to disk and loosing data (MongoDB), some horror stories ops teams had when having to debug a PaaS for days because of some complex problems (Kubernetes), an article why a company switched away from a cool new database which could provide live updates on changes (can‘t remember the name, product is now open source and not really maintained as company shut down) or people experiencing latency problems with new technologies calculating every interaction on the server ( Phoenix LiveView and all clones).
So i didn‘t get more money, build a cool business or got more attractive for the other gender but i am at the bleeding edge on technologies without having all the problems of depending on them. I can use them when they mature or simply ignore them because sticking to more boring technologies will be better for my mental health.
I do get a lot of knowledge on hn which i don‘t get anywhere else.
Ps.: If you don‘t want to participate in discussions it‘s really nice skimming through the comments 48h after the topic got popular. So much information without a big time investment.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#53HN does offer quite educated conversations about a wider spectrum touching tech, startups, investing, business models, science and just being on the edge of things. Sometimes with high profile folks from those industries. There is no other community like this, even no sub on reddit.
However, I find as good discussions in specific reddit subs with (of course) less dogma since you are then in some subs with like-minded folks. Here you get quickly downvoted for slightly "wrong" wordings/messaging/opinions which again makes sense because the variety of audiences is higher here but also hurts the user experiences. So while reddit is often real fun and ends with long convos on some discords, HN is somehow different and creates some obsessive behavior before and after paired with a weird need to be "right" which I do not experience in this strength on other forums. While it educates (sometimes), HN often leaves some aftertaste.
Then there is—because of a huge number of YC members and alumnis—some bias here which reflects in respective up- and downvotings, extra boosts and gravities, flagging, shadow-banning (HN has probably the most sophisticated shadow banning techniques than any other forum) and in general very fast moderation/correction of unwanted behavior.
But yeah, every community has their pros and cons. FWIW, I limit my HN time while I do not limit my time on reddit.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#54I've been following HN for 10+ years, first as a lurker and then getting into the whole "build something people want" thing. Over the years, I've "launched" quite a few projects here. Some have failed, while others have succeeded far beyond my modest expectations. But in a pre Product Hunt era, launching on HN was the only way to get exposure to your product. Even today, for a number of highly technical projects, HN is the best place to get the word out.
While HN crowd has a reputation of being too cynical at times (the most famous example being the original "Show HN Dropbox"), over time, pre-empting how the HN crowd will potentially react and what kind of criticism a project might attract has actually helped me improve the product before launch!
> I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But just for one day.
My latest project, Typesense, which is an open source instant search engine (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) literally found traction only after posting here on HN. Yes, it was a ~50K single day traffic, but it had a permanent impact on the baseline traffic. So nothing is as useless as it looks :)
Apart from the value I've gotten out of all these Show HNs, there is an incredible amount of value in the comments on HN. In fact, I often just skip the main post and just skim through the comments. Also, unlike certain other forums, snarky/toxic comments are discouraged and moderated.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#55Hacker News is like a slot machine with positive expected value. Most days are interesting or sometimes a waste of time. Occasionally you see something like altering. I’ve gotten one big business idea that changed how I ran things and made me a lot of money. Like I mean permanently life altering my business worked instead of didn’t amount of money. But most days are not like that. You also get some information early.…
It would be nice to know more about what you got out of HN (permanently life improving, I'd like some of that please?). To me, HN is an interesting distraction from deep work. Perhaps you have a better strategy of extracting value from HN, maybe you can share that.
I can't disprove "That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.", but buying GME based on posts on HN to me (or selling), is absurd and is extremely far from "inside information". As someone who noticed the GME pump 1 week before its peak and spends time on HN, there was no way I was going to put money in GME or "ride it to the moon".
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#56The value I derive from hackernews isn’t anything like that.
I just read a lot of interesting stuff here in both posts and comments that is directly applicable and helpful to my day job.
Actually, come to think of it. I did meet my wife through someone I met at a HN meetup.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#57Invested in and made a fortune off Nvidia after reading various comments. Similarly Sold Tesla near the peak based on comments here.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#58> Basically money, power etc..
None of those, personally. I'm sure that some people have benefited by finding business ideas and opportunities or new jobs but there are other ways to do this and it's hardly a good reason to spend time on HN.
> Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
The largest benefit for me is being exposed to a mix of interesting ideas and being part of a corner of the internet that's quite a bit more civil. The effects that this has over the long run might be positive but they are also difficult to quantify.
It's okay (and healthy) to do things that can't be assigned a specific monetary value.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#59 The learning alone is worth it.
I think very few things in my career have been as formative as this site.
Interesting bug troubleshooting articles, learning about new tech being released, learning about new zero days, seeing people post their work or see new ycombinator companies inspires me. I'm also able to see when AWS is down or Google shuts down one of it's apps before anyone else. All around good stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an odd feature of the thing - I'm a native English speaker so I'm ok with that but getting upvotes / downvotes is quite good practice for improving your writing, I've found.
Yes that’s actually how I got my start in writing. I had a travel blog back in 2007-08 and would post entries to Facebook. I gauged writing effectively by comments and rapidly improved my style. Ended up starting a writing focussed business. Don’t think I could have done it without frequent and rapid feedback. Your comment made me realize this is probably why I keep writing comments. It is constant, precise feedback…
I only started my "technical blog" (heavy quote marks here) after four years of posting comments on HN.