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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?

#141

Post by maximente »

i consider all tech - all forums, social media, etc. - to be similar to a special forces group (or pick your favorite non-violent elite group). it's best deployed with a clear objective in mind - learn more about Haskell from gurus, see how S.V. is reacting to tech workers/wages changing, get a job or work from monthly threads - until either the effort is a success, more time/energy can/should be brought to bear, or it can be easily aborted without much fanfare.

so, what do you want? if it's to network, connect, learn, debate, get a new job - do that, and avoid the addictive type stuff like refreshing every 10 mins, etc. if it's to avoid boredom, well... tread carefully.

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

#142

Post by PhillyG »

username91 wrote: post #4

Seeing what other people are working on via HN dulls my desire to work on similar things, so it's a nice way to kill ambition and melt into complacency.

Why not offer to collaborate with them if you're interested in doing something too?

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

#143

Post by dnautics »

took out puts on intel twice on bad news about their processors. Made a ton of money, though the second one was an accident. The bad news went unnoticed but i was still sitting on the position a week later when it was announced the CEO was fired for diddling his underling; and then the stock tanked 30%.

The market can become irrational in time to put $ into dnautics' pocket (this sort of thing has happened to me more than a few times now).

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

#144

Post by linkdd »

capableweb wrote: post #121
linkdd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I agree with you, I also sometimes feel that some comments get unfairly flagged and then trying to argue your opinion to be futile. But I also think that not every place on the internet is for everyone. I for one feel that the Twitter atmosphere is not comfortable, but I can imagine how other people do think so. So I try to stay away from Twitter. Not all places invite all groups of people on the planet. I like…

Every social place has its own "traditions" if I dare use this term.

Twitter is not really a place for debate (more for rants IMHO), but HN is. And not every one wants to debate and that's cool.

What I enjoy the most on HN is the often insightful content (based on years of experience), but many threads bring "hype wars" or some kind of tech-related drama, what I remember the most is:

  - C/C++ is evil, every one should do Rust
  - Kubernetes is evil because it's complex
  - Your business is failing if it's not generating 100k MRR
I do not even bother anymore to argue against that.

NB: I exaggerated intentionally to make my point, I know there is more nuanced opinions, and some real/justified concerns about those topics.

IMHO, While HN is a "social place" (there are people who can talk), this is not a "social network" (I will probably never remember your nickname even if we talk again together in another thread).

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

#146

Post by JakeStone »

Sure.

I hit your (2) criteria a while back.

In general though, for me, it's a case of finding out additional tech/science things I wasn't aware about and reading what are generally informed opinions about said things. Sometimes I get to be one of those informed opinions.

That became useful to me when I ran across a post about H3 spatial partitioning. I actually had a use case that I'd been working on using DGGRID for a few months, and that was turning out to be computationally expensive, and I couldn't make it work in near real time for my specific use.

This in turn led me to developing a project I've been working on for a while that has expanded my skill set in a handful of disciplines, and if I hadn't run across H3, I'd probably have thrown away my project as a lost cause.

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

#150

Post by Ariez »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #15

I've all but given up social media elsewhere on the web, HN is one of my last holdouts, and I would argue that's it's more of a forum than classic social media. HN does not engage in nefarious methods of keeping you engaged. It does not send you alerts telling you about what you've missed, it does not curate the home page to place you in your own personal echo chamber. These for me are it's strengths. However, like a…

I have to agree it does feel more like a forum. I wonder how HN achieves this.
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