I grew up believing SWE was something I couldn’t do after a very abrasive C++ course I took in my youth. It took a few years but the content posted here directly contributed to me pushing past those fears.
Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
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Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#72It helped me learn to hate startup culture individual by individual, and not just as an abstract group.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#73One of my employees found my company through a "Who's Hiring?" post, so that's a huge benefit to me. I definitely prefer speaking with people directly than having to deal with recruiters. Otherwise, it's interesting for me to occasionally see what people are thinking about, but I try not to let it consume too much of my time.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#74Just my personal opinion, but if you’re looking for a place to advertise your startup, then I doubt HN is the right place. Personally I come to HN because it’s one of the few places you can have a discussion and read comments without having to dig through dozens of memes and low attempt jokes.
I was going to answer in a similar vein, although I don't normally participate in the discussions, mainly because English is not my native tongue and although I think I can now read at the level of a native speaker, I find it significantly more difficult to write in it (and, being a language that for reasons that elude me I love, I hate how artificial and unnatural my phrases sound like). In my case, I have a backgro…
Well, the level of English in this comment is well above that of the average on Hacker News!
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#75There’s upsides and downsides. I learned a lot about how to steel man arguments and to hold decent, well cited arguments online.
I learned about lots of things I wouldn’t have otherwise learned exist.
And ultimately I learned that I can program, from seeing that even the people who are pro/excellent can do the wrong thing, that the barrier isn’t all that high, and there is still large value in gluing libraries together for a purpose.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#76Hacker 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.…
> That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.
As a person who gets paid convert knowledge into product, HN is an easy place to check a once or twice/day to keep up to date on decently filtered knowledge/information. I have other sources I follow, but as you said, if it hits HN it's probably important enough that I should know it exist.
And yes, this is a vague answer because that base level knowledge can manifest itself in many ways when solving a problem.
In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments on.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#77Met my co-founder thru HN comments. We’ve since operated a delightful consumer SaaS business called Readwise for the past 4 years. I think this speaks to the main benefit for me: hanging out with forward-thinking technologists I couldn’t in real life.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#78Yes, 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.
HN is part of the reason I moved to SF back in the day and started my company. My company is the reason I met my wife, because she saw me wearing a t-shirt I made to promote it while walking down the street in SF. You could say HN is the reason I met my wife ;)
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Basically I was running a business, and found someone on HN whose site exposed me to a substantially better model for the same asset I had. Revenues eventually 10x. 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…
> If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#80You get to see what the average developer thinks.