Ask HN: What has HN given you?

Irritable bowel syndrome

In 2016, I came across a Show HN for a laptop powered by your Android phone (called Andromium at the time, now Sentio). I thought the idea was amazing, went over to their office, met one of the founders, and the other soon after. They gave me a shot working for them in a partnerhips / growth role, even when I hadn't had any experience doing that kind of work before, but had a strong desire to learn. Can't express how grateful I am to have met that bunch and worked with them for almost a year. So much learning. Lifelong friendships. And I was able to see from up close the challenges of delivering a hardware + software product from both engineering and a distribution standpoints. Definitely influenced my current path. I’m working on a product now that I’m excited to ShowHN in a few weeks.

Back in my 2nd year of college, when I first found HN, I was inspired by many cool projects that were posted here. Within a year, I decide to take the plunge to build an app from scratch. Ended up taking a lot longer than I had thought (didn't realized how complicated a simple looking app could be), so I skipped a semester and continued to work on it with a friend. It was a great learning lesson that gave me the confidence to try and build out ideas when I had them and see what would happen, rather than just sit around hoping someone would build things that I would want to use.

Lastly, I admire the culture here that focuses on creating actual value and doing things rather than chasing status. That has been a huge influence for me - as someone who was very influenced by social pressures and craving for status during high school, and early college (e.g. getting into a top college, getting a job at one of the “top” 5 tech companies), I believe I’ve slowly shifted towards valuing actual work that creates value for others in a meaningful way and caring less about other proxy symbols of “success”. I have a long way to go, but I’m grateful to have been exposed to thoughts and a culture that pointed in this direction, during a time when my mind greatly craved the opposite.

Thank you.

Your phrase "it was like a new world was opened to me" really took me back. Before "the orange website" cynicism, before disillusionment with technology, before deciding startups were a tool to exploit engineers. I remembered finding HN in university - this weird non-web-2.0 website - and learning there was so, so much more to know outside of the narrow computer science curriculum. Things I first heard about on HN include:

* TLA+, now one of my main extracurricular technical interests

* The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, kicking off a tour of philosophy that seemed like simple intellectual exploration until I needed it most

* Conflict-free replicated datatypes. I loved their mathematical purity, noticed the CRDT Wikipedia article was a stub, decided to write it, and so got back into editing Wikipedia.

These plus countless other things I don't recall, some of which permanently joined my amalgamated pool of knowledge and influence me in ways I don't even know.

There really has not been a long-term drop in the stock so that would have been (and still would be) very risky. You were smart not doing it.

But s/he's made two comments, and neither has been killed. Both are heavily down-voted, but that's not the same.

Even so, if anyone keeps getting shadow-banned then I'd expect that they'd learn how to make comments that don't get them shadow-banned. If they just keep banging against the moderation without changing their behaviour and without adapting to the community, maybe they really don't belong here.

Finding it hard to care, given the comments I've seen.