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Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

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Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#1

Post by throwawaynay »

I've been trying to spend less time on time wasting stuff. Not necessarily to work more or be more productive, but to only spend time consuming quality content or necessary stuff. So I've blocked about a few websites on my computer(from social medias, to forums, clickbaity news sites...)

So instead of wasting a few hours of my time between reddit memes, pointless flamewars, and stupid articles about made up issues, I spend them between hackernews and linkedin.

But is that really better or just an equally addictive illusion? Isn't this just a facebook for techbros?(me included)

After years of browsing HN daily, did you reap some benefits out of it?

What's your take on this?

Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#2

Post by MattGaiser »

I have made friends, interviewed for jobs, connected up with a few people in person afterward, helped others find jobs, learned all sorts of fascinating facts for whenever I am forced to make idle small talk, found ways to sleep better, learned why my past company had a doomed model, gotten all sorts of free tech goodies, discovered tools to make work easier, and had some great debates.

I tend to have a lot of meetings in my life anyway where my presence is required, but little else, so that is where a lot of my HN time comes from.

Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#4

Post by CarbonvanE »

I think there is quite a difference between HN and most other social networks, the general level of discussion is significantly higher than almost any other online place I've visited.

The biggest problem for me personally with HN is that the front page updates every few minutes. To counteract this I made https://hackerdaily.io, it's Hacker News, but only with yesterday's posts. This really helps me to not check it every time I'm bored and want some dopamine and to actually read more of the articles and discussions.

Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#5

Post by d3nj4l »

It's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I think it's been a positive influence. I've tried to mitigate the negatives by assiduously avoiding threads I know will have meaningless flame wars or absurd overreactions in the comments - anything on Apple, or the culture war, or cryptocurrencies and associated tech, or (to some extent) Mozilla. Over time I've found that there's a few repeating patterns to HN comment threads so I can tell which ones to avoid from just the title or the top comment. If you find yourself mired in meaningless conversations here, do that same thing you would do in any other social network: learn to filter out things that don't add value.

Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#6

Post by rgoulter »

CarbonvanE wrote: post #4

I think there is quite a difference between HN and most other social networks, the general level of discussion is significantly higher than almost any other online place I've visited. The biggest problem for me personally with HN is that the front page updates every few minutes. To counteract this I made https://hackerdaily.io , it's Hacker News, but only with yesterday's posts. This really helps me to not check it e…

FWIW, HN now has a "top links of the day" under the "past" link at the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/front

Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#9

Post by webmaven »

It's definitely useful. Most of my other aggregate information sources have serious overlap with each other or are hyper-specific, HN is a definite outlier that surfaces a broad range of interesting material I wouldn't come across otherwise.

As for whether this is positive... If I'm being objective, I can't say that having even more well-curated content available is a positive influence. But my difficulties in curbing a tendency to binge on reading material aren't the site's fault.

Though, it would be helpful if I could set the front page to only show 10 or 15 items instead of 30.

Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

#10

Post by sigmaprimus »

I find the value I gain from HN is that it provides me a slight edge to the stock market. I am an early riser and find that by visiting HN before the markets open offers me an opportunity to be aware of new information before it hits the street. This could be a hammer sees nails everywhere situation but more likely breaking news articles with high HN engagement are a good indicator of a news story's potential effect on the market.
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