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

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41–50 of 105 posts

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

#41
I have always thought several years ahead about my career, and the best way to do that has been keeping up on the professional literature. Back in the days when magazines were a thing, I subscribed to them with my own money (and wrote it off) because it was that important to me. The equivalent today is reading HN, and if I were you I would have no problem regarding it as an essential part of my career development.

Plus, it is just a good part of my life.

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

#42
Yes. The signal does come with some noise, but I've found HN incredibly valuable for my professional and career development. I spend quite some time here but I think it's worth it.

HN pretty frequently has posts from senior engineers or senior managers sharing things they've learned over long careers, which I feel has given me a shortcut into many of these insights.

Without HN, I would not have been as aware of how hot the developer market is at the moment, or what common salary levels are around the world. I'm starting a new job next week, through a startup that I found because it advertised a role on HN, at significantly higher compensation than my previous job.

Comments on HN have given me a lot of insight into how people approach things like contract negotiation or how they deal with conflict or frustration in the workplace. Often these comments come from a place of experience with patterns recurring over many positions at different organizations. I'm heading into (only) my third job so these experiences are valuable to read about.

Beside that I've also found many resources that were just fun or intellectually stimulating here.

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

#45
It's like news and opinions, it can help you to keep you up with whatever is moving out there, and sometimes some relevant opinions or counterviews come up. News in general come also with a downside, you can find much literature out there.

To me your issue sounds like procrastination, which is normal and very common, just make sure it is not out of your control. Find a balance in how you spend your time, perhaps you would like to read HN as much as a magazine or only the top articles of the week if that helps you.

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

#46

I browsed a lot prior to 2019 and recently again. I used to work in software development but have moved out of the field recently. I love HN and derive a lot of benefit from it, unfortunately during the Great Scare I found it impossible to stay away from the associated threads. That sort of stuff seems to have died down now though, so we're good. If I could just censor any mention of it I'd be much happier, I'd add i…

What was the Great Scare?

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

#47

It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities. - I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often. - The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness.…

the down-vote thing unfortunately is not unique, Reddit has the same problem, but worse. I once made a simple comment there where I just told an anecdote about something that happened, it wasn't anything serious, political or controversial or unrelated to the parent post, but apparently it rubbed someone the wrong way and he took it upon himself to go trough my comment history and down-vote the last 60 comments I've made.

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

#48

It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities. - I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often. - The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness.…

I find the lack of humor disturbing. I’m told/observe it’s due to the plethora of native tongues, neurodiversity, timezones, caffeination and other variability hereaboots. Idiomatic expressions and deadpan, in particular, seem to set off the kerfuffles, ke?

In my experience, forum moderation is Sisyphus-complete and utterly thankless. The fact we have had this refuge that functions as well as it does for as long as it has, well, res ipsa loquitur. Thanks, mods, fwiw.

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

#49

It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities. - I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often. - The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness.…

> HN definitely has a techbros vibe. I guess that's by design but it's not very inclusive. What does this mean?

It means the stereotypical commenters are 20-30 year old, white, male, single, programmers, living in the Bay Area and making $400,000 per year.

Which is good if you want to know the latest Google gossip or many tech questions. But not as good when we are talking about topics that are less directly in the experience of the above people.

As an example when you are talking about public transport they have experience that comes from living in the US. Rather than somewhere a bit less car-centric.

A tech example might be that money and VC dollars are plentiful but programmers are expensive and that non-programmers are less important in a business.

There are plenty of people that are not like that, but the site has a definite bias that way.

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

#50

It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities. - I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often. - The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness.…

> HN definitely has a techbros vibe. I guess that's by design but it's not very inclusive. What does this mean?

Have a look here https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
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