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

Very recently I achieved a significant boost in production system perf from comments here about the underlying hardware of GCP at different custom assignments. This saved decent $$ at a small company.

I've used HN twice now to cash in on the rise of BTC (unfortunately my liquid capital is low enough that this is only low 5 digit gain).

And you say information doesn't count, but filtering through the information and analysis here is a high signal way to "get ahead". To acquire power at work and amongst friends it helps to be both insightful and reliable, as well as confident. While HN doesn't make me reliable it sure as hell helps on the other fronts.

In my case, I have a background in statistics and biotechnology and I use Hacker News (via RSS) to learn about new developments in machine learning and related technology. I tend to ignore all news related to politics/social issues because HN, on average, has a very narrow-minded (too engineer-like, often ignoring a lot of vital nuances) way of looking at those topics. Also, I'm from Europe and I find that there's a particularly American way of looking at business and personal projects that we don't have here and that I feel beneficial to get exposed to (even with its downsides).

Edit: To expand a little more on my process of using HN, in case anyone finds it interesting, I subscribe to the frontpage RSS feed, so that I usually get between 75-100 stories (just the headlines) per day, which I then proceed to quickly scan to open the interesting ones (both the original URL and its accompanying HN discussion). I've found the signal/noise ratio to be more than worth it (also factoring in the time it takes me to do all of this).

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 on my skill in what I do.