I learned that there are many others working on something similar to what I'm working on, and they have many great ideas.
Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
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Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#22Lurking for years, have recently started an account.
I often use the Algolia search at the bottom of the page; I mostly look in the comments and not for articles.
Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#23[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#24Over 9 years. Yes, the first few years, I have absolutely learned a lot. Got exposed to many new programming and startup concepts I probably wouldn't have otherwise. Would often find new ideas here and spend a lot of time digging deeper.
Nowadays, I don't know. Not many things surprise me on here anymore. Some of it is surely just knowing more. But I do feel like HN "missed" some big developments. Crypto/blockchain is one example of a major trend that got very little coverage.
Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#25I've been reading off and on for about a decade. Lots of cool stuff has come up over the years. I've pretty learnt that I'm always the dumbest one in the room.
Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#26A few years. Not really. HN isn’t focussed enough to learn any particular area. It’s more a place of interesting random discussion.
Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#27About 7 years I think (with another account before this one). I appreciate the range I can dip into.
Learning through participation and active application of content is going to be higher than only observing propositional knowledge and feeling like you 'know' stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot
#28Created this account around 9 years ago (I've been in tech for 20 years or so). Never really used the site up until the past couple of years though, when I got in the habit of browsing it regularly (along with Reddit and a few other venues I'd ignored - went on a mini-binge of expanding my tech/social news sources).
Don't know that I've gained a lot of hard/useful knowledge necessarily, it's more an occasional source of interesting news and informed commentary, within the subset of interests HN revolves around. Have gathered some background material on specific topics of interest to me (HCI, workspaces, personal knowledge management).
I don't submit much or engage in discussion very often (this post being an exception, trying to move the consumption/creation needle a bit), but HN is an excellent resource. The simplicity of its UI and general model is refreshing, and the signal-to-noise ratio and quality of both contributors and moderation is very high.
There's also a zeitgeist aspect; I know if anything of significance happens within a range of interests, I'll likely hear about it here.
Overall though, HN is more a source of news and intellectual stimulation for me than a learning resource. It's an excellent and pretty unique one though, would miss it if it was gone.