i love to bookmark HN threads instead of articles sometimes. especially for technical stuff. the commments usually have a lot of good discussion and related links.
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?
#102This 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
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Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#103I agree with others, especially graeme's idea of HN as "a slot machine with positive expected value". I get ton of new ideas and ways to approach things by reading through the comments after getting my own view of an article. Just that is enough for me to think I get more value from HN than the time I spend on it.
One concrete thing I've managed to do is earn a lot of money on reading and understanding the sentiment of users who know more than me. The concrete scenario is around AMD as a stock, which I invested in late September 2019, only based on reading and trying to understand users and why users here prefer AMD rather than Intel for most common tasks.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#104This 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
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And this kind of cherry-picked reply-replies is why I'm happy that some people hate HN. Let them find a different place to misunderstand comments and focus on something irrelevant :) Then the rest of us can assume the best of the people we discuss with.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#105Not 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
I scan Reddit wide but this sub I didn't know
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#106The main benefit I get from HN is some level of knowledge about newer technologies and what people are thinking about them. My day job is not very innovative so it’s really easy to fall way behind in knowledge. From reading HN comments i can see what other people are thinking about things and see what’s fashionable right now.
This helps me at my day job to take a lead in getting our systems more up to date
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And this kind of cherry-picked reply-replies is why I'm happy that some people hate HN. Let them find a different place to misunderstand comments and focus on something irrelevant :) Then the rest of us can assume the best of the people we discuss with.
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Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#108Hacker 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…
> In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments on.
Can you expand on your methods here? I still get value from HN but want to dial things back a bit.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#109I found my current job on here. It was on a Who's Hiring post awhile ago. One of the better things to happen to me and my family in years.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#110It is a waste of time and a growing place of toxicity a smugness, but it is not very different from the rest of the internet.
> toxicity smugness
Sad but true, it's kinda like what stackoverflow has become. It's also site of overwhelming group-think.
I anticipate downvotes to prove my point.