61–70 of 283 posts
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.
The wife has negative ROI anyway. If she isn't getting me more money, a new job or another wife, there is no tangible benefit.
Also feelings, life satisfaction, love as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
Hacker 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.…
This for me. I’m greatly satisfied when a problem I’m working is also a topic oh HN—even obliquely.
Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.
Hacker 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 absu…
It’s not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific model wouldn’t help you here, but basically if you have a business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly:
1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset
2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better
3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing deep work (I fall prey to this at times)
You’ll see some stories in this thread of people who were not programmers on HN and who received the message “hey you can be a programmer”. If you have this knowledge it is trivial, if you don’t it is life transforming. So whether HN has any life transforming potential for you depends on whether you have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path which is substantially better than the old path.
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For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic knowledge of call options.
1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big signal is showing “hey wsb seems to be on to something, it made it through the hn bubble”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208
2. My reaction was “oh interesting” (—> note to self “stop and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early pandemic stories too)
3. But what you could have done was checked the price of short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose 10x so I’d be surprised if call options returned less than that.
(If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know_
Don’t put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time your ROI would be very positive.
The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and adjacent tech sources I’d say I knew pretty much what was going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north America.
I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve.
Disclaimer, to all reading: please don’t start gambling on HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to other sources and has high signal.
2) I was hired because of my post on HN: No
3) Girls chasing you because of your reputation as HN: No, and no guys either.
Not to be flippant, but you seem to have misunderstood the intent of HN (if this post was made in earnest that is). If these are the things you want to get out of HN then you should probably get out, for the sakes of both your own and HN in general. Alternatively try and learn to enjoy the benefits of knowledgeable discussion about all sorts of topics that may not fit inside your normal bubble.
Hacker 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.…
> “And if you think about what you are working on as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.” This for me. I’m greatly satisfied when a problem I’m working is also a topic oh HN—even obliquely. Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;rig…
Precisely. Well put. There’s no way HN works as a quick fix or as a direct source of gains.
Hacker 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.…
I wonder how many HN people became buy-and-hold millionaires.
I don't see how you can compare it to sites that monetize user engagement though, since there is no monetization at all here.