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Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
171–180 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#172> I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But just for one day.
I've noticed that some submissions are these single-serving-sites[0] that eventually become memes that people re-share for eternity, so the 'one day' sentiment isn't always true. A site can become part of Internet culture pretty quickly, and continue to get high-vol traffic for some time. One notable example is this gem: https://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/
I share this in business meetings to communicate decent design principles, despite the NSFW title, and continue to share it on social media, forever surfacing it to remind people about the 'lean web' / non-obese web. The stats for the site would be interesting to look at.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#173One year during university my summer job fell through at the last second. I emailed 3 people who had posted on who is hiring asking if they'd be interesting in hiring an intern. I got an interview within 24 hours, scheduled under 24 hours later, and I was hired in the interview (at a big company too). In the interview they asked me how much money I wanted, and apparently I named a number that was too low because they paid me more than I asked for.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#174In your context, I didn't actually get the tangible benefit that was there, so this doesn't fully count. However, I became aware of Bitcoin when they were going for ~9 cents, and thought seriously about buying 300-400 when they were $1 due to another HN article. I'm sure I'd have spent the BTC on pizza or something even if I'd bought it, but there are tech waves that start as ripples and HN is one of the first places…
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Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#175The value of HN, to me, can be summed up by one quote from Noam Chomsky:
> There also just is a need in the media to present a tolerably accurate picture of the world... for example, take the Wall Street Journal, the prototypical business press: the editorial pages are just comical tantrums, but the news coverage is often quite interesting and well done... people in the business world have to have a realistic picture of what’s happening in the world if they’re going to make sane decisions about their money.
I’m not saying Hacker News is the WSJ of tech, but the reason I read HN is because it presents the most holistically accurate picture of the tech world that I’ve seen. Top comments are frequently people with a deep, first-person understanding of any given story - usually better than the linked story itself. Having that kind of understanding of the world available in your phone’s browser is simply invaluable in making well-informed long-term decisions about your career, skill development, and money.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#176The thing to realize about HN, social media more broadly, and life in general, is that there is always much more noise than signal, but there are also always nuggets of extremely valuable signal mixed in at random with the noise.
If you want to discover the signal, you can't hate the noise. Understand that noise may even be a generator of signal. Embrace it, explore it, and harvest the signal from it.
As such, a few things I've learned on HN have positively impacted my career in a major way and sent me down a career path I may not have discovered otherwise. Namely functional programming, formal methods, and PLT (to which I wasn't exposed in school). I've also met people here I've later collaborated with IRL.
The name of the game is figuring out which noise is more likely to generate the most valuable signal for you. For example, if you're a programmer, then the noise of celebrity Twitter is going to generate much less signal for you than HN, programming Reddits, or similar.
Be strategic about where you spend your time, but also be forgiving of the noise. It's part of the process.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#177I read articles I enjoy and comments that are sometimes really interesting. That is the sum of he refit to me and more than worth it.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#178Hacker 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.…
> “And if you think about what you are working on as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.” This for me. I’m greatly satisfied when a problem I’m working is also a topic oh HN—even obliquely. Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;rig…
I think you hit the crux of the issue.
On the one hand, life does not work the way OP assumes. It's not linear, we don't "read HN –> profit."
On the other hand, news in general can become a meaningless and value-less distraction.
So I think they key is what you said: intellectual curiosity and exposure to high-signal information, without a highly specific goal in mind. You get the value of serendipity and filling in some unknown unknowns while avoiding senseless and endless clicking. HN fills that niche about as well as anything, though it certainly can become a distraction if you let it.
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#179Most recently, a job.
And not just any gig. I’m working with a small business that makes awesome products while staying very efficient from an biz ops perspective. It’s great to make an impact and share success with a likeminded team. It’s fun working with physical products again too and I’m learning so much indie e-commerce.
Shoutout to Chad and BoardGameTables.com
Re: Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
#180The signal to noise ratio for posted content is way better than most similar sites, and the comments are usually informative although they’ve become slightly more opinionated and polemic over the years — but even so my trust in the “right” comments rising to the top is much higher here, so the community moderation still works well.
There’s also some ridiculously smart people here, so reading comments tends to make you smarter more often than they make you want to go to bed early, which is saying something these days.