I got a much clearer sense of the deeply Ayn Rand political sensibilities of HN and much of startup world. I naively expected a mix of sort of normal California liberalism with utopic, egalitarian aspirations. But in fact the dominant ideas seem to be a kind of just-got-to-college paused-philosophical social Darwinism, I’m special so regulation is just a hindrance, social issues and justice are just a distraction kind of vibe. Getting a deep feel for that here transformed my relationship to startup culture in an important way, and I’m grateful for that.
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?
#92Hacker 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.…
The biggest life-altering idea that was personally investable to cross hacker news is most certainly Bitcoin. That’s something we all knew intimately about before the general public. I wonder how many HN people became buy-and-hold millionaires.
Heh, I think about that a lot. But no way I would have held until now, personally.
However, for anyone psychologically inclined to like the idea of BTC and hold they could have found out about it early and got them for pennies or even mined.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#93Hacker 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…
You've crowd sourced your job to some of the most engaged people in the industry; bravo.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Look here: https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain
Are those american or european?
Doesn’t have high out of the money but if I’m reading it right the potential returns for buying Jan 20th were insane. A $60 call potion expiring Jan 29th was $1.20.
GME went to $500 or so. If you exercised such an option at, say, $350, your profit on the exercise would have been $290.
At a cost of $1.20. 242x return.
And thank you, that site is incredible. Very hard to find such data. Another example of HN’s value. I searched for this kind of thing off and on for weeks, but it randomly pops up on an unrelated thread because I made an offhand mention. That’s HN.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#95I heard about Bitcoin when the whitepaper was released, however I never profited from that experience, so when I heard about Monero in someone's comment years ago, I bought some of that and have made some pretty good (tangible) money.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#96[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#97I realised that software engineering and programming can be a lot better compensated than I thought. This has given me some leverage to pursue better salary and an idea to land a remote job somewhere well-compensated. The latter is just an idea at the moment, but I'm thinking of acting on it later this year.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#98Not HN, but I'm #32 on electronics.stackexchange.com, the top 0.5%. I did get something concrete out of this: they sent me a free tshirt with the site logo on.
I'm #24 on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ) and am proud to report that this has got me absolutely nothing tangible.
I did consider trying to turn my most upvoted comments into a book, since I've probably already written 50-100k words here, all they need is a little editing, right?
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#99This question is silly. You can find business opportunities, jobs and romantic partners by pure chance in any social situation. If you're trying to find "tangible benefits" by asking people "did you find them by hanging out here?", you're doing it wrong.
The people here are intelligent and have widely varied experience. They discuss topics that are of interest to me, with minimal BS. That's it. That's the benefit
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#100Not tangible I guess, but HN gave me rest from Reddit's stupidity and incivility. I do want some social web-hangout, and migrated from one place to another—and while Reddit is (or was) better than what we have in my country, it's overrun by teens and tends to bring out the worst in them. HN has its share of dumb crowdthink, but the contrast with Reddit is illuminating, so that now I notice when I begin to act or thin…
There are some good subreddits out there. r/experienceddevs springs to mind