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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?

#111

Post by amelius »

hooande wrote: post #99

This 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

Cognitive bias is a weak point of HN, which is the reason why posts like "how I made 1 million selling cheap stuff" are always likely to be on the front page.

It's also the reason why founders have an enormous working drive, most of them fail, while VCs of course are the ones laughing their way to the bank.

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

#112

Post by graeme »

woutr_be wrote: post #12

Just 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 actually found my favourite finance tracker, Lunch Money, because the creator posted here. And her posting it here really helped her company grow.

So it does happen a fair bit if your startup is relevant.

https://lunchmoney.app/

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

#114

Post by User23 »

graeme wrote: post #108
matwood wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The average comment quality nosedives when the subject has in any way been politicized. I don’t always follow it, but as a rule for any post about climate, immigration, diversity, and so on reading the comments is at best a waste of time even when the submission is high quality.

Comment quality is generally high on computing related technical subjects—unsurprisingly for a community composed of subject matter experts.

Finally I’ve noticed mixed comment quality on financial posts. There is significant noise but there are many commenters with an excellent operational grasp of how our financial system really works.

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

#115

Post by linkdd »

capableweb wrote: post #104
_qulr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

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.

I feel more and more than HN comments is not for every one and not for me. If you're not careful with your wording, you'll get flagged and your message will be dismissed and it seems futile to argue against it.

This creates an "elitist" atmosphere (totally subjective assertion) that I'm not comfortable with.

Your comment is the perfect example of that.

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

#116

Post by 627467 »

Being a 'low-tech' (compared to most other web destinations these days) and text-only sites with some social interactions is one of the reasons I come to hn multiple times a day. I sorta learn to ignore most things posted.

So benefit: low bandwidth, (relative) low noise news source compared to other places

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

#118

Post by jsherwani »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #7

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.

Thank you for this gem and the responses. I haven’t laughed out loud from something I’ve read on HN as much as I just did thanks to this comment and its children comments.

Even though I got zero wives out of these comments, there was some real value generated here!

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

#119

Post by FlyingSnake »

I’m a old fogey who’s on HN since 2007, and HN is one of the rare forums that has helped me in my career. I lurked a lot during early years but the value I got from it was immense. I honed my craft of software engineering just by being here and randomly discovering Nuggets of wisdom. HN is a treasure trove if you know how to find it. The olden comments are especially golden.

Edit: the best feature of HN is the absence of notifications when someone comments on your comments and absence of an award system. This removes the Karmafication of the interaction

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